Yojimbo 1.3

“Master the Onslaught” is the tagline Bare Bones Software uses to describe their latest product. Yojimbo functions as a storage and retrieval system for notes, Web bookmarks, PDFs, serial numbers, passwords, and images. You may be thinking Bare Bones may have lost their minds. After all, the OS X Finder is one big information repository, right?

Don’t worry, there’s no cause for concern. The Bare Bones crew hasn’t lost it just yet. Yojimbo acts on a more granular level than the Finder, providing a convenient location for storage of all the little snippets of information that are useful and important but don’t exactly fit elsewhere.

Yojimbo in Action

Here’s an example of how Yojimbo works. Let’s say you are gathering information about the Open Source technologies used in Mac OS X, specifically the licenses that are involved. Yojimbo’s Drop Dock makes it easy. An unobtrusive tab sits on the edge of your Finder screen. You find a page on Apple’s website that looks like it might be helpful, but you don’t have time to investigate it fully. You grab the link from your web browser’s address box and drag it into the Drop Dock.

The Drop Dock slides out like a drawer, and you place the URL into the “OS X Open Source” collection you created in Yojimbo. A few minutes later, you’re reading a passage from the book Open Source Licensing and you see a paragraph that is particularly revealing. You hit F8, which opens the Quick Input Panel, and type in a quick note.

Subsequently you decide to compare Apple’s Darwin license with the pending GPL 3 license. You find an interesting document that describes the rationale for some of the terms in GPL 3, and download it as a PDF. When you drag it into the Drop Dock, the PDF is quickly imported by Yojimbo.

The next day you read more about the GPL and open source in general. You add a few more snippets of text and new URLs to your collection before finding yourself at a website called Slashdot. It looks intriguing, so you sign up for an account. Again the Quick Input Panel comes to your aid, this time with a special note format specifically for saving passwords.

Now that you have a useful collection, you can search it rapidly with Yojimbo’s built-in searchbox. The URLs you gathered aren’t cluttering up your the bookmarks in your browser. You didn’t have to create new folders in your Finder for content that you may not even want to keep, but important items like passwords can be kept handy all in one place. You can even password-protect Yojimbo.

Additional Strengths

In addition to research, I find Yojimbo extremely handy for all of the administrative minutiae relating to student loans, the registrar’s office, the school network, and so on. Having all of that information in one easily-searchable place can be quite handy.

One of the best things about Yojimbo is that it handles information in native formats. When you import something into Yojimbo, it doesn’t go through a one-way transformation that renders it unreadable by other applications. I found this out when my 30 day Yojimbo trial ran out. I hadn’t shelled out the $29 Bare Bones requires for the student license of Yojimbo. Thankfully, even though Yojimbo would no longer start, it did provide me the opportunity to export. All of the content I’d entered into Yojimbo was exported in familiar formats: PDF, RTF, TXT.

This means when you use Yojimbo, you can be sure you’ll be able to use the data you place into it later, with other applications. This alone is a huge selling point for me.

Yojimbo or StickyBrain?

In many ways Yojimbo is akin to StickyBrain, although StickyBrain is a more full-featured application. I’ve used StickyBrain for the last couple of years, and I think it’s a great program. However, I only find myself using about half of its functionality. I use all of Yojimbo’s features, and I don’t find myself wishing for more. It’s a small, sharp tool that gets the job done. It is also blazing fast, and it doesn’t get in my way or interfere with my workflow.

Recently I exported all of my StickyBrain notes and scooped them into Yojimbo. I’ve got a feeling I won’t be using StickyBrain much any more, but if you haven’t tried either application, I advise you to give them both a test run. They’re both fine applications, but different people have different needs.

Drawbacks

The only real complaint I have concerning Yojimbo is that the Quick Input Panel doesn’t allow for assignment of a new note to an existing collection. You must go into the main Yojimbo interface in order to assign notes made in the Quick Input Panel. The main Yojimbo interface is quite intuitive, so this is not a major ordeal. I can also see that adding the ability to select a collection for a new note might complicate the lean, clean approach that makes Yojimbo so fluid. Overall, Yojimbo is a more than worthy addition to the Bare Bones oeuvre.