Tutorial

Welcome to JXCirrus Diary!

If you have just started up JXCirrus Diary for the first time, then this tutorial should be able to help you get started... It will help you around the main screen, let you create a task, add an appointment, and have a look at the plans that the computer makes.

What is JXCirrus Diary?

JXCirrus Diary is intended to be a bit like one of those bulging old paper diaries that people used to walk around with in the '90s - Full of all sorts of information like their to-do list, their address book, appointments and little notes scribbled all over the place. The examples we have pre-loaded should give you a bit of an idea of the different sorts of information you can dump into it.

At its most basic, JXCirrus Diary can be used as a to-do list. But it is a to-do list with a few twists that makes is different to many of the other to-do list programs out there.

Massive to-do lists (which become projects)

JXCirrus Diary can handle massive to-do lists. 5000 tasks? No problems! 5000 tasks in a long list becomes a bit hard to manage, so JXCirrus lets you arrange them into smaller groups in a tree structure so that you can find things more easily. If fact, you can start with a big task "Fix House", and break that down into "Main Bedroom", "Kitchen", etc and then break those down even further. This lets the system grow from a basic to-do list, right up to making plans for an overseas trip, planning a party, planning a wedding, renovating a house, or any other project you
choose.

With the Diary++ add on, you can access extra features, which turns JXCirrus Diary into a full project management system.  This includes planning for multiple people, user timesheets, and handling of large, complex projects.

Doing the planning for you

Having your massive list of tasks is all very well, but it can be a bit tricky knowing where to start... This is where JXCirrus Diary can come to the rescue. It will look at all of your tasks and try to fit them into some kind of plan so that everything gets done when it is supposed to. Once it has this plan, it can tell you two key things:

Changing the way the system works

The Diary++ add on gives lets you tinker with the whole way the system works. You can change what information is stored about tasks, write macros to automate things, and even have JXCirrus Diary run other computer programs for you.

The Main Display

The main screen of JXCirrus Diary opens by showing lists of your diary entries, arranged into different tabs.   Click on the tab marked Tree - This is the tree view.

The Tree View

The tree view lets you browse through all of the entries in the system. Many of the entries are hidden away underneath the top level ones.

To expand the entries, click on the triangle symbol on the left side of the entry (on Linux, it is a + sign). You should see it expand to show you a whole lot of entries underneath it.

If you click to the right hand side of the list, the details of the entry should open in item view on the right of the screen.   If you are on a phone or table, the tree view may be hidden when the entry is opened.   This view showing the item details is called the Item View.

The Item View

The item view is the area on the right of the screen (or the phone screen for mobile devices).   The item view always shows the details of the entry that you clicked on most recently.

The Examples

To help you get started, we have added a bunch of examples into your diary. The best way to see them all is from the tree view.   Here is what they are

This gives you a starting point, but the great thing is that you can change the structure of your JXCirrus Diary to be whatever you like.

Next: Creating a Task