Yojimbo is a great new application from Bare Bones Software. I purchased and installed it yesterday and spent several hours getting things set up. I love this software. So, what is it? What does it do?
Yojimbo is an information organizer. You can use it to store all kinds of information. Anything from the very small, like the URL of a web site, to the very large, like a big PDF document, is fair game. I have used many other applications in the past for this task, including:
- Discrete files. This is actually pretty doable now, since Apple has provided the wonderful Spotlight capabilities. But the three biggest problems with this route are:
- It wastes space on your hard drive. The minimum amount of space that a single file takes up is based upon the way your hard drive is formatted, but for small chunks of information, you definitely waste space.
- It’s a hassle to have to create a file, decide where to put it and what to name it, for small chunks of information.
- There is not a hassle-free way to synchronize this information, safely and securely, among an arbitrary number of computers. For me, I like to keep information on my laptop, my big Mac at home, and my big Mac at work, all synchronized.
- StickyBrain, version 4. I have used several version of StickyBrain. Don’t get me wrong. It is good software. It’s a bit sluggish, but basically sound enough. It does not allow you to synch information between multiple computers. Yes you can backup notes to your .Mac storage and restore from the same. But the discipline required to make sure you don’t accidentally lose information is far more trouble than it is worth.. Chronos does have an upgraded version of this software, called SOHO Notes, that supports synching between multiple computers and I did some research before deciding which product to go with. But information that I read in the user forums has led me to conclude that the sync capabilities are buggy and slow.
- I have used various Wiki applications. But you have to either keep the information stored online, which requires Internet access to read or update it, or hand-roll some kind of sync solution. Plus the mechanisms for entering information, as well as the ability to easily enter or store styled text with graphics, is limited.
There are other applications that I have tried as well, but I’m getting tired of typing. Suffice it to say that Yojimbo is some bad-ass software and I like it very much.
