Everyone who climbs will probably be familiar with the "tradition" of writing down all the climbing routes ever made in something like a diary.
jClimber's Diary is an application made for this purpose. I added some features that can't be found in a normal paper-diary. Here are some of them:
- hierarchal organization of the entries into climbing areas, rock groups, rocks and climbing routes
- fast navigation and search capabilities via the tree-structure
- optional commentary for each entry
- count the number of climbing areas, rocks and routes
You will not experience many of the disadvantages of a paper-diary when using this application. For example, there are no more pages falling out or bad handwriting (when you are too tired after climbing).
The data of this app is stored in a XML-file (the format of the future). You can display and edit your diary-data in many other applications such as webbrowsers or office-suites. You can be sure that you won't lose the data in the next couple of years, and there will be always XML-applications for it.
The entries of the diary are organized in a hierarchical tree structure. So it's guaranteed that you always keep survey, even when the diary is massively growing every summer.
On the top level of the tree structure you can find all the climbing areas in your diary (e.g. Rocky Mountains and Alps). All these areas are divided into rock groups. Each rock group can consist of other rock groups again. So you are able to build your own hierarchy.
A rock group contains all rocks, which belongs to that group. In smaller climbing areas it is also possible to add a rock directly to the area. (You don't need to create a group for only 2 rocks :-)) Each rock entry contains all the routes you have climbed on this rock.A sample tree could look like this: (sorry, I have no better sample names !)
- Alps (Gebiet)
- Rocky Mountains (area)
- Western rocks (group)
- Eastern rocks (group)
- Stonehead (rock)
- Old way (route)
- North variant (route)
- Yosemite (area)
This structure guarantees that you will alway keep a well-ordered arrangement in your climber's diary. It is also much easier to navigate through and find entries in it.
You can add a climbing area by pressing the menu item 'Add->Climbing area'. Enter a name for the area and an optional comment in the following dialog box. After that the new area will be inserted (alphabetically sorted) in the existing ones.
Rock groups can only be added to areas or other rock groups. You must select the entry on which you want to add a group and press 'Add->Rock group'. Rock entries can be added in the same way, but you must have the area or rock group selected, on which you want to add the new rock. In both cases you must fill the same dialog described above.
After creating a rock you can add your climbing routes to it (the rock must be selected) by pressing 'Add->Route'. You will get a dialog in which you must fill in the data of the route. At least you should enter the name and the difficulty (in any scale or format) of the route and the date you have climbed it on. If you have climbed it in lead, turn on the lead checkbox.
In the textfield for the comment you can optinally enter informations about the route (length, security, partners, etc.). So you can easy reconsider routes you have climbed years ago.
When you wan't to enter a route which you don't have completed, then you can remove the completed flag in the dialog. Such climbing routes are always marked by a red icon.Of course you can view and edit the data of the entries you have once entered. Select the entry an press the menuitem 'Entry->Properties' (also in the context-menu via the right mousebutton or in the toolbar) and you will get the dialog with the data for this entry again.
If you want to know how many areas, groups, rocks or routes are contained under an entry in the diary you need to select this entry and press 'Entry->Count entries' (also in the context-menu) and you will get a dialog which displays these numbers. For counting all the entries in the diary you need to select the root-entry ("Climbing areas") of the tree.
You can delete an entry by selecting it and pressing 'Entry->Delete'. If this entry has sub-entries (e.g. a rock with some routes), they were deleted too.
When your diary is growing and growing it can become necessary to reorganize parts of it. For instance it's usefull to devide a rock group into sub-groups, when there are too many rocks in it. In such cases it's possible to move entries in your diary via 'drag and drop' from one entry to another.
You must select the specified entry and hold the left mousebutton down. Then you must drag the cursor to the entry, on which you want to append the selected one. The mousecursor turns to a hand-symbol, if the destination-entry is valid. Valid means, that you can only append routes to a rock and not to an area and so on (as described above).
It is possible to search the whole diary for entries, which contains a specific text in their names. The dialog can be startet by pressing 'Entry->Find'.
If you wish to search the entered text in the comments of the entries too, you can set this option there. There is also an option for starting the search after the selected entry. This makes it possible to serch on, when the previous found entry is not satisfied.
When an entry with the entered text was found, the entry becomes selected and the searchdialog closes.
Sometimes it could be very usefull to have a ordinary list of all the entries in the climber's diary. Such a list is very practical for some purposes e.g. printing.
For such reasons it is possible to export the diary data to a HTML file. So the exported file can be viewed, edited and printed very easy with external programs.To start an export you must press the menu-item File->Export. This will bring up the export dialog, where you can specify the export filename.
It is also possible to export only parts of the diary (e.g. all entries in a specific climbing area). For this you must select the start entry before you enter the export dialog and set the 'Export from selected entry' option.
The application jClimber's Diary is free software and is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, Vesion 2 (see file 'LICENSE.txt'). Feel free to modify the sources of this application, as long as you distribute it under the GPL too.