Yojimbo: The beauty of simplicity

It wasn’t very long ago that I used to rely on DEVONthink Pro as my main repository of all things relevant to me.

DEVONthink in any of its editions, is a beautiful piece of software. I’m a registered and very satisfied user since October 2004. I upgraded from Personal to Pro and I’m very likely to purchase a license for the brand new ‘Office’ edition (*1).

DT sports sort of an artificial intelligence engine that helps you find connections (even semantic ones), between whatever contents you feed into it.

In order for DT’s magic to work you need to provide its database/s with some structure. DT needs the user to create a couple folders and have some contents placed among them. In this way DT learns which contents you place in which folders and it soon starts to see potential connections within the database contents. From the Devon Technologies website I recall learning that the richer the folder structure, the better the connections seen by DT would be.

DEVONthink was already popular among mac geeks… but I really don’t know if it hit the mainstream mac user base… though mentions at the NY Times and subsequent blogposts such as ‘Tool for thought‘ by Steve Berlin Johnson surely didn’t hurt.

A couple of posts like the ones that every so often come from Merlin Mann at 43Folders quickly confirmed what I had always suspected: that I was heavily under-utilizing DT’s capabilities. And I felt sort of guilty for it…

DT has some of a learning curve to it… and getting info into it wasn’t always for me the easiest of tasks… In fact for me it used to involve sort of a workflow. The folks at Devon Tech have been undergoing recently an effort in order to let the people know what DT can do for them. I can’t exactly recall the dates but DEVONacademy saw the light… and it wasn’t there before… as well as I suddenly stumbled upon a couple of new scripts to assist the user get info inside DT from browsers.

How does my capturing workflow look like nowadays? Is a one click journey from whatever is frontmost in Safari/Omniweb to Yojimbo.

For me Yojimbo has been a huge time saver, and though I didn’t see it at first… it turned out that not only for information ‘capturing’ means… but for information filing as a whole –as in keeping and retrieving–, too!

Up to version 1.2 I had to develop a similar way of organizing info within Yojimbo… I created a bunch of folders (collections in Yojimbo’s jargon…), and copied webarchives, notes and what have you into them. No learning curve there… though there wasn’t much sophistication there either.

So, what was the great breakthrough? I had already caught a glimpse of it when I was graciously given access by Mark Bernstein to Frank Tansey’s piece on “Filing with Tinderbox” at Tekka. The same applied when Scott Morrison’s MailTags hit Mail.app a while ago…

So, kiss your folders and guilt goodbye… as it turns out: It’s all about the ‘tags’!

Tagging is a very simple and efficient way of filing information… Tags combined with a decent search tool would be a dream come true…(BTW: Wasn’t ‘Spotlight‘ supposed to be about that?)

Well, Yojimbo brought ‘tags’ to its version 1.3… and all of a sudden most of those collections didn’t make sense any more… Information filing is effortless… and retrieving is easy and just works.

Now, if only we could combine tags and words from either names or contents in queries…

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Brief last note about getting info into Yojimbo: For some reason, sometimes ‘bookmarklets’ do not work… and previous to ver. 1.3 there was no way in the world that the ‘Quick input panel’ would work more than two consecutive times… What to do on such occasions? Fraser Speirs to the rescue! These scripts have never let me down. Not a single time…

All the best, TFS

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(*1) By the way: Chris Gulker has been running for a few months what seems to be a paperless nirvana project… I recommended DT Pro to him on his blog a while ago… This new edition with it’s OCR capability, seems to accomplish on its own what he has been doing for a while combining a number of other software pieces.

Keep it up Chris. We wish you all the best in these difficult times from here.
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