May 4, 2000
REVIEW
Digital Diaries Offer Angst and Inspiration
YOUR NOTEBOOK
(WITH HELP FROM AMELIA)
(Pleasant Company; $19.95;
Windows 95 and 98 and Macintosh;
ages 9 and older.)
DIARY MAKER
(Scholastic; $29.95; Windows 3.1 and
later and Macintosh; ages 10 to 15.)
DARIA:
SICK, SAD LIFE PLANNER
(Simon & Schuster Interactive;
$19.95; Windows 95 and 98; for
teenagers.)
By ALICE KEIM
y first journal, which I kept
when I was in third grade,
was white with colored
hearts and a tiny brass lock. For
several weeks I wrote about what I
did each day and declared love or
disdain for various family members
and friends. For a while I even wrote
about each of my stuffed animals
and their imaginary adventures.
But before long I began to skip
days, and my entries became shorter. Less than a month after starting,
my highlights consisted of ""Today
was a normal day"" or ""Nothing happened today."" My journal writing
burnout lasted until high school,
when I began writing again, this time
recording my moments of anxiety
and great insight in a pastel blue
Laura Ashley journal.
The fabric-covered journals I remember are still available, but children now have software options that
perform the same function: helping
them to express their thoughts, emotions, joys and fears in private.
YOUR NOTEBOOK (WITH HELP FROM AMELIA)
This is an outlet for creative
young journal writers. Amelia, a fictional 10-year-old created by Marissa Moss, is imaginative and shows
an appreciation for sarcasm without
the usual teenage bitterness.
You enter her room, where the walls, posters, windows and books are all interactive. Clicking on the poster of a
rocket, for example, causes the rocket to take off and a parachutist to
pass the window. But beyond a fun
start, the bedroom has little to do
with the journal.
The journal writer can choose
among fonts, colors, pictures and designs, either on a blank page or on
pages with titles like ""Friends Forever"" or ""Things I Hate."" Images
can be imported from other programs or from a huge library.
I created a page using the ""Gross
Food"" heading, where I described
the horrors of eating eggplant. Then
I used the drawing tools to draw a
picture of the dreadful vegetable.
With a microphone, I could have recorded my voice saying ""yuck,"" to
be sounded whenever the mouse ran
over my drawing.
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Using multimedia to
embellish life's
important moments. | |
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I started another page with a blank
layout and imported a scanned photograph and some happy music.
There are many creative corners to
explore, and a user with writer's
block can click on a light bulb icon
for suggestions.
On the downside, the program ran
slowly when creating new pages and
journals and when importing images. The print screen provides suggestions about binding a printed
journal up to 50 pages long.
DIARY MAKER
This program, from
Scholastic, approaches journal writing as an art. The journal portion
seemed primitive compared with the
other programs, but its educational
program includes excerpts from the
journals of Anne Frank; Latoya
Hunter, a immigrant teenager who
grew up in the Bronx; and Zlata
Filipovic, a young girl who wrote
about her struggle to survive in Sarajevo during the Bosian war. Users
can hear pages of the diaries read in
English and explore other information about these journal keepers. All
three provide the inspiration and motivation to practice the art of journal
writing.
Unfortunately, Diary Maker's
writing component does not measure
up. It is simple and feels ready for an
upgrade. Users can add backgrounds, sounds and images to their
journals, but there are no drawing
tools and the library of stamps and
sounds is limited. The program provides remarkable inspiration for
writing, but its tools will feel restrictive to today's computer-using writers.
DARIA'S SICK, SAD LIFE PLANNER
This software, for older children and young adults, takes a cynical approach. It includes a calendar,
a planner, a journal and other electronic toys. The program is similar
to any organizer product but it has
sardonic, angst-ridden comments
from Daria, the MTV cartoon teenager, interjected throughout. The
tools are accessible and useful, but I
found the extras, like Daria screen
savers and icons, disappointing.
I am a Daria fan, and as I typed
daily musings into the journal, I
found my own inner Daria scowling
through. It becomes nearly impossible to write anything overly enthusiastic or optimistic in this journal.
The program includes an address
book, but when you add a buddy, the
somber Daria comments, ""Great,
another person who pretends they
like you."" For a teenager predisposed to thinking this way, the Daria
journal offers encouragement --
maybe too much.