Description:
If you've ever worried about walking into your room and finding a younger sibling nose-deep in your journal--or worse, if this has actually happened!--then Girls Only Secret Diary is the program for you. This electronic diary comes with a keen understanding of a girl's need for privacy when recording her thoughts and experiences. Not only is the diary password-protected, but users can also scramble text so that it can't be read or decoded onscreen. Additionally, users with a color printer can send their friends messages that can only be read with a special decoder. In this sense, Secret Diary is vastly superior to an old-fashioned diary, with its easily picked brass lock. Secret Diary comes with other useful features, such as an appointment calendar and address book. It allows users to make personalized stationery for sending letters to friends or family members. Diary pages can be likewise decorated with various borders, and a host of small, decorative graphics is available for further personalization. These function like stickers--you pull them off a strip to the left of the paper and stick them anywhere you like. The graphic options make for a pleasing emphasis on creating a diary that is visually appealing as well as a repository for written thoughts. On the down side, Girls Only Secret Diary ignores one fundamental aspect of the diary writer's experience--the joy of reading old entries, years later, and rediscovering past trials and successes. Diary text is not easily exported or backed up to another format (such as a text file). The diary's contents are thus vulnerable to a catastrophic hard-drive crash, a virus, or even the replacement of an old computer--situations where diary data could be irretrievable. A user's best option for hanging on to their writings, then, is to print out every single page. However, the sheer enjoyment of creating attractive and colorful diary pages may make this drawback worth enduring--if you can just find a place to hide those pages once they're printed! --Alyx Dellamonica
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