This MacNews Category Review looks at journaling and scrapbooking software for Mac OS X. Products covered include iRemember, iScrapbook, MacJournal, MemoryMixer, My Memories Suite and Student eJournal.

iRemember

iRemember is a Mac-only scrapbooking product. It's a tool for making personalized scrapbooks. iRemember includes clip art, templates, borders, backgrounds, and a clip art browser. You can create borders, backgrounds, and frames. You can drag your photos from iPhoto and crop them to a variety of shapes and sizes. And you can add text and clip art to your pages.

You can use photos and images from iPhoto, digital cameras, CDs, scanners and the Internet with iRemember. The software allows you to drag and drop photos directly from iPhoto or your digital camera. You can manipulate the images in iRemember so your original photos remain untouched. All the usual scrapbook sizes are supported.

iScrapbook

iScrapbook is a tool for designing and printing scrapbooks. It comes with one-step tools to let you draw shapes, add graphics, arrange and align objects, rotate objects and add designer special effects.

There are more than 30 shapes with smart controls to help you create custom design elements. Built-in rulers, project grid lines, snap-to-grid, real-time alignment guides and full zoom capabilities simplify the positioning of objects. iScrapbook also comes with an array of special effects, including image cropping, photo effects like Sepia, shadows, transparency and linear and circular gradients. Plus, you can create more advanced special effects like selective focusing, clipping an image to any shape and filling text with any image. The software ships with 100+ smart-masks which can be used on both shapes and images to create fades, soften edges, add texture, etc.

iScrapbook can import photos and clip art in several formats. A built-in Favorites Bin lets users store favorite graphics, shapes, and text for future reuse. The Favorites Bin even "remembers" any special formatting or attributes applied to an object such as font, stroke color, transparency, masks, etc. Photos and albums from iPhoto are automatically loaded and accessible from the built-in Photo Browser so users can simply drag a photo right onto their scrapbook page.

MacJournal

MacJournal organizes all your important information and helps chronicle your life. With it you can create a personal journal with with two-level security (password protection and AES-256 encryption). MacJournal allows users to add any kind of content, PDFs, QuickTime movies, images, and text.

It also offers Smart Journals, which allow specific criteria to be searched upon. You can assign each entry a rating, status, and priority, and sort any journal by those values. You can record audio entries for your journal or even podcast. If blogging is more your style, MacJournal lets you publish your work as a blog (or record video from your iSight) to any of the popular blogging services, including your .mac account. Even blog video to blogs on Blogger, WordPress, LiveJournal, .MobileMe and more.

MemoryMixer

MemoryMixer allows users to combine photos, music, narration, videos, graphics, typewritten text using their fonts, scanned memorabilia and a host of other tools. Digital camera lovers and traditional scrapbookers alike can then save their creations into a virtual album that can either be put on DVD or CD, printed in a hardbound book, printed at home and kept in a traditional album, emailed, or uploaded to the web.

MemoryMixer lets you apply photo effects, including cropping and zooming. It includes QuickMixes, a collection of professionally designed layouts allows users to auto fill their photos creating an album in minutes or create a page from scratch layer by layer. Also, the software offers more than 1,200 different embellishments, ranging from ribbon and brads to definitions and flourishes. It includes 400 various digital backgrounds in square, portrait and landscape orientation, including nature, metal, patterns, and textures.

My Memories Suite

My Memories Suite is a tool for creating digital scrapbooks. You can add video, narration and music to your scrapbooks. You can share your albums as hard or soft-bound books, CDs, iPod videos and greeting cards.

Student eJournal

Student eJournal supports a range of journal-based projects and assignments. It includes multimedia capabilities for augmenting written entries. Student eJournal is designed for networked, lab settings. Teachers can attach spoken or written notes to individual entries. When students reply with their own notes and peers join in the discussion, they are creating a writers' workshop culture.

For an in-depth round-up of Mac products, go to the Macintosh Products Guide.