Yojimbo 1.3: Tagging, hyperlinks and more
Bare Bones has updated Yojimbo, adding support for tagging, hyperlinks, better handling of passwords, improved web archive support and some interface tweaks (see the full changelog here 
).
The big ticket item for many will be tagging. And Bare Bones has left no stone unturned in implementing it.
Tags can be entered in the item’s Inspector, directly in the item’s details bar or through the quick input panel. In addition, new bookmarklets for the major Mac browsers allow the option of adding tags at the point of bookmarking or archiving a web page.
You can find the new bookmarklets by searching Yojimbo’s help for “bookmark”.
As one would expect the tags are nice aqua tokens. They auto-complete and Yojimbo even offers you options if your typing matches more than one, as you can see here in a screenshot of tagging via an item’s new look details bar:
Yojimbo lets you find tagged items again by searching for them or by creating “tag collections”, smart folders that match on user-defined tags. It can also display them as a new column in the interface’s main view.
Unfortunately, the tag collections can only match items with “all” the nominated tags. There is no “any” option. Surely that will soon be fixed:
People looking for a more keyboard-orientated way to tag, will be glad to find that two tab-key strokes bring you to the tagging field in an item’s details bar.
The new version also provides for hyperlinking within items. You can add web URLs or links to emails with LinkABoo or (soon) MailTags and add links to files and folder just by dragging them onto the hyperlink dialog:
Lists and Tables are now supported in notes too, which is nice.
Other new features include provision for Yojimbo to use Apple’s Keychain, more details options for how passwords are handled and Command-clicking in web archives to open URLs in the background.
Perhaps I should also mention that Yojimbo users who also use Mail.app will get a lot of mileage out of an applescript that pipes selected emails into Yojimbo. I use this a lot.
Yojimbo costs USD 39 (educational licence USD 29). The full version and a demo are available from Bare Bones’ web site .
UPDATE: Patrick Rhone has some interesting thoughts on the new tags in Yojimbo 1.3 vs. traditional sorting by sub-folders, part of the great “tag in one archive vs. file in folders” debate.
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November 11th, 2006 at 12:57 am
Very interesting, this might pull Yojimbo a bit ahead from KIT for me (I own both and I’m using KIT right now). The only thing that I dislike from Yojimbo is that I could not find a simple way to do incremental backups of its data. But now I’m torn ;-)
November 11th, 2006 at 7:08 am
Incremental backups are out I think due to the monolithic database. This is one of the things that puts EagleFiler ahead.
Still, I am starting to love Yojimbo enough to forgive it a few foibles (rather like my feeling for Mail.app).
November 11th, 2006 at 7:16 am
Well, they’re out because they don’t want (yet) to provide a way to iterate through the database (using AppleScript for instance). What I could do is use some sqlite tools to extract the contents, but I’d rather trust Yojimbo’s export tools.
On the other hand, I can always have a weekly reminder to do some manual backup. I’m not sure how to proceed yet. (And to top all this, I’m really tempted by 43Folders’ discount for Devon apps …)
November 14th, 2006 at 8:13 am
How ironic that another Schmidt (of course he spells it wrong) is mentioning KIT here. In my world, KIT beats (at least the pre-taggable) Yojimbo hands down and I’d love to see more people use it.
Among other things, you can drop images into KIT and they get handled correctly, but even cooler is the ability to drop ANYTHING on KIT, which copies and and drops it into your library. I use it to drop zips or dmgs of things I want to check out at some point in the future, thereby clearing my dl folder. You can of course add keywords in the info box which, while not tagging, helps.