Thoughts

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What?

I suppose I should begin with what Thoughts is. Well basically, it's an electronic diary/journal. I thought, "Well, I'm getting older now and it would be pretty cool if, say, 20 years from now I could look back and see what I was thinking and what was important to me." So, I decided to start keeping a journal. Well, like most programmers, rather than look for an appropriate shareware/freeware program that I could use ... I just decided to write my own. Visual Studio.NET (Microsoft's main application development tool) is brand new and what better way to learn something than just do it. To be honest, Thoughts is not my first .NET application, but a little more practice never hurt anyone, right?

Features

Thoughts isn't what I would really call a feature-rich application, but it does have the features I thought would be important in an application like this. Here are a couple of them:

Offline/Online mode - Thoughts can be used while you are completely disconnected from a network. It really has the concept of local & remote storage. By default, Thoughts will keep a local copy of all of your entries. You can also store your journal entries remotely. Heck, you can even you my server to store them if you want to. It's a nice way of making sure you don't loose anything.
Encryption - In your daily journal entry you have two areas to write your entry: the public section, in the private section, or both. If you choose to, you can have the private messages encrypted. They will be encrypted locally and remotely. The only thing to remember about encryption is it uses the password you provide to encrypt your entry. This is necessary because you wouldn't want someone reading your journal entries with their password. However, this also means if you decide to change your password at some point, you better not forget the original password becuase you'll need it when it comes time to read your old private messages.
XML Storage - The local storage for journal entries is XML. So, if you want to process them later in some way, this should make it real easy on you.
Remote Storage - The server component is also available for download. A starter database script is available and you can either use web services or a direct ADO.NET connection. The remote storage capability will also prevent you from having a single point of loosing all of your data.
User Interface - I think the UI is very straight-forward and simple. A feature? Yea sure, why not?

Techno Info

No, not Techno as in the musical genre ... Techno as in short for technology. If you're not a programmer, you probably won't find this section very interesting. If you're an intelligent, hardworking programmer, you should download the source code. However, if you're a lazy programmer and you don't really feel like messin' with the code just yet, THIS is for you.

I'm having a lazy moment ... I'll get back to this later.