Yojimbo

Yojimbo is a new snippets-saving app for OS X. I've been enjoying it and I'll probably stick with it. It allows you to drag text files, text snippets or URLs into an unobtrusive sidebar, which adds them to your "library." Your Library is a sortable Mail-like view of all your snippets, and you can sort them into sub-libraries that are like iTunes playlists.

I've tried a bunch of note taking solutions but never quite stuck with one. vi was my old favorite when I was on Unix and a terminal was always open, but that's often not the case on OS X. BBedit is fast, and I love the diff tool and other flourishes, but keeping "notes.txt" open all the time felt ... wasteful. Voodoo Pad was fast and fun, but I always forgot to open it, and then I would have versions that were out of sync. I felt like I had to maintain it more than I wanted to. Most commonly I had a file of URLs and short snippets "to sort," but that was obviously suboptimal. I know people love and swear by DevonThing, but it just seemed like overkill for my needs, which are "keep" and "search." The absolute best-in-class notekeeping app in the world is still Microsoft OneNote, but Yojimbo is the first piece of OS X software that deserves mention in the same sentence as the heretofore undisputed champion.

There are some more features I'd like to see. I suppose this is a wish list of features that would be true of any of the above apps as well, but like I said Yojimbo is currently closest to my ideal.

• Clipboard Integration - Jumpcut is still the best-in-class OS X clipboard manager, but it's getting a little long in the tooth. I'd love to be able to sort and save anything from my clipboard within Yojimbo. I often realize too late that I actually wanted to save that thing that was in my clipboard ten minutes ago. A nice view of the last n (50?) items from my clipboard which I could easily mark as "saved" would be a lively feature people would appreciate. Like I said, no one besides Jumpcut (not even Quicksilver or Launchbar) does this right.
• "Smart" Collections - Right now you can create as many "collections" as you like, but their behavior is static. What I really want is smart collections as intuitive as iTunes' smart playlists. For instance, I'd like everything that starts with "#!/usr/bin/perl" to be a code snippet, and I'd also like to to look at everything I bookmarked last Tuesday. Luckily for Bare Bones, the company that produces Yojimbo, the text factory tool built into Uncle BBedit is a great start on the kind of intelligent regular expressions that regular people may want to use.
• A Better Dock Icon - The Dock icon looks amateurish, dare I say beta. It's the kind of "cool" dock icon that a college kid would put out or that would be attached to an internal build of an application. I don't keep any "persistent" icons in my dock, but at any given moment I may have fifteen to twenty applications open and Yojimbo's icon just doesn't sit right yet. Unless you're the Adium duck, your icon should make some attempt to describe what your app is doing, even if it's in a very abstract way (a la Camino or NetNewsWire's dock icons). And no, "kick ass" does not qualify as descriptive enough.
• Image support - This is the one area where OneNote eats Yojimbo's lunch $4.99/lb buffet style. Image support would be useful in a million ways, especially for web developers who often have desktops full of chopped up web mockups and icons. I could say "media" support, but I don't care about audio at all. I know other people will, I just don't.
• Outlining - I don't need this, but if I can't have smart collection lists I'd like some way to group items together logically, and an outliner is a tried and true way to accomplish that. It only needs to be one level deep, and it doesn't need any of Omni-outliner's magic. It should output OPML and XHTML lists regardless.
• Scriptability - This is a no brainer, and I'm shocked that it was absent from the first release. Bare Bones has always had fantastic Applescript support in their software, but in this case it's totally missing in action. Blog posts always start as fallow thoughts and bits of text or a few URLs open in tabs. Scriptability would also allow cool things like social bookmarking support. A few examples:
  • Show me all my bookmarks about espresso!
  • Post this to my weblog! Anil will link to you. This can work quickly with Atom, MarsEdit, or XML-RPC.
  • Immediately slurp in my photos tagged nyc!
• MacBook Tablet Support - This is obviously notional, but it has flawless support for capturing chicken scratch and funny sketches so that the app is ready when Apple drops the Maclet on us. This is another area where OneNote absolutely thrives.

Didn't mean to spend so long on that. While writing this post I realized that I really want a better "snippet" management app. All told, Yojimbo 1.0 is a great start.