Yojimbo and EagleFiler, two personal information management apps, have been updated.

Both gain greater support for AppleScript and well as other enhancements making them easier and quicker to use.

Yojimbo 1.4 gains an “Untagged” factory collection, so that you can see at a glance which items are untagged.

Like many people, I was hoping for a change to the smart collections for tags, which would allow an option for matching “either/or” on multiple tags.

This didn’t happen.

The only option for multiple tags is still “match all”.

The big ticket item in this update is the improved AppleScript support.

Yojimbo now has a solid AppleScript dictionary.

I am not very good at AppleScript myself, but this does open the way for others who are to write scripts that will better integrate Yojimbo in our workflows.

I’m looking forward to that. More examples like Dylan’s Yojimbo, del.icio.us and NetNewsWire scripts can only be a good thing.

An extension in the way URLs that point to HTML are handled makes it possible to import Mailsmith HTML attachments and the contents of the Firefox Scrapbook collection.

EagleFiler 1.1.2 also features improved AppleScript support, including a new “import text” command which takes a text string and creates a new rich text file in the library.

Navigating through the various elements of the interface with the tab key is now more reliable.

Users of PDFView can capture PDFs in EagleFiler.

The operation of EagleFiler is snappier due to improvements in the way emptying the trash and indexing searches are handled.

Many tweaks and fixes are also included, which you can read in the full changelog .

Yojimbo 1.4 is a free update for registered users. So is EagleFiler 1.1.2 .pim, productivity, yojimbo, eaglefiler, applescript, not apple mail, not mail.app

Konrad Lawson has written an applescript which will cleverly pick out the text of an email you have sent to yourself and use it to create a note in Yojimbo.

You attach it to a rule that matches text in the subject line (like, say, “Note:”). Then anywhere that you have access to email — the coffee shop, the library, roaming the street or wherever, you can email yourself something worth remembering. Get back to your Mac and you will find it waiting for you in Yojimbo.

It’s a useful addition to a growing number of applescripts for Yojimbo that help the app to work even smarter: Jim Correia’s script that exports a selected email into Yojimbo and Dylan Damian’s del.icio.us-NetNewsWire-Yojimbo “mash-up” scripts.yojimbo, mail.app, apple mail, productivity, notes, applescript, getting organised

On the Yojimbo mailing list, Robert Foxworthington has posted his system for “Getting Things Done” (GTD) with Yojimbo.

It’s the first comprehensive attempt to do this that I’ve seen, and makes clever use of the new tagging features recently introduced in Yojimbo 1.3.

Naturally I prefer to use Mail.app to manage how I get things done, but Yojimbo is also a good candidate as Robert points out:

It’s lightweight, easy to use and very well designed (usability wise). Since I keep a lot of my “stuff” in Yojimbo, I also wanted to do my GTD in it so that all things are in one place instead of spread out over multiple applications… which, ever since tagging support was introduced in 1.3, works pretty well now.

He uses Yojimbo Collections to define his projects, grouping them by assigning the same custom icon to home projects or work projects.

Most actions or tasks are empty notes with just a title (and tags). He admit that he misses the strike-out feature for completed actions that often grace GTD apps but it’s not fatal:

When you’re done with an action, simply click Yojimbo’s Delete button and select “Move to Trash”. That way of course, the completed action just moves to the trash and there is no cool crossing-it-out-which-makes-you-feel-you-just-accomplished-something, but that’s OK. You can always look at the Trash’s item count to see that you’re actually getting things done.

Contexts, people, “states” and due dates are all handled by tags with specific suffixes:

Contexts are tags with an @ suffix (e.g. home@, work@).

People have tags too, basically the person’s initials with a #
suffix (e.g. af#, sk#).

Tags with a + suffix are used for “states” (e.g. waiting+,
deferred+, someday+, inbox+).

Due date tags are a date with an ! suffix (e.g. 0612!, 061224!).

Using suffixes helps Yojimbo to auto-complete the tag more reliably.

These customised tags give him nice flexibility in filtering his items with Yojimbo’s search box:

Search for the “home@” tag to see all the things to do at home… or search for “fm#” to see all the items that are related to Fred Madison, or simply search for the “#” tag to see all items that involve other people… or search for “!” to see all the items that have a due date, or search for “0612″ to see everything that’s due in December 2006… or create tag collections for frequently used searches like “inbox+”… or search for the “Urgent” label to see all urgent tasks.

Yojimbo can’t order actions and items as well as some other GTD apps nor does it easily allow for sub-projects, but Robert finds that he doesn’t miss those traditional aspects of the GTD approach as much as he thought he would.

It’s a fine system, useful and clever in equal parts.

If you are not a Yojimbo user, there are lots of other Mac apps to help you get things done.GTD, getting thins done, yojimbo, productivity, tags, collections, howto, mail.app, apple mail

The Quicksilver plugin for Yojimbo was updated today.

In the absence of any release notes, one can only guess what might have changed. Having to guess like this is part of Quicksilver’s charm generally, so here goes…

It introduced something which is either new or at least new to me: an “Append Text (makes plaintext)” option specific to Yojimbo rather than the generic Text Manipulations action.

This allows you to select an item in Yojimbo and append some plain text to it, for example quickly to add to a list of books that I need to borrow when next at the library:

Obviously, this especially nice for people who use Yojimbo as a hub for “Getting Things Done” (GTD) or for managing a series of plain text to-do lists.

If this feature has been there all the time and I just haven’t seen it, someone will no doubt let me know.

UPDATE: As some readers have noted in the comments, I should have mentioned that you will need to turn the action on in Quicksilver’s preferences. Go to Preferences > Actions and search for “text”. Then check the box to the left of the action in the list. Then refresh. Then enjoy:

yojimbo, quicksilver, gtd, getting things done, append text, plugin, not apple mail, productivity

On the Yojimbo mailing list, Dylan Damian shared two applescripts that help to integrate the new tagging feature of Yojimbo 1.3 with del.icio.us and NetNewsWire.

They use pukka to tag a URL in either Safari or NetNewsWire, post the link to del.ico.us and then create a web archive of the page in Yojimbo complete with the same tags.

For example, if you run the first script (tip: make a Quicksilver trigger for it) when viewing a web page in Safari, it launches pukka.

Tag the page with your chosen del.icio.us tags, and submit the page.

Pukka posts the URL to del.icio.us for you and then the script creates a web archive of the page in Yojimbo with the same tags.

Yojimbo becomes in effect, an off-line backup for your del.icio.us links.

The second script does the same thing from NetNewsWire.

In a nice additional touch, the scripts get Growl to tell you that they have done their job.

It’s all very clever and works a treat.

You can get the text of the scripts from Dylan’s post in the Yojimbo mailing list archive or just grab the two scripts here (PukkaAndYojimbo.zip).

They are easiest to use (I think) if you place them in the Safari and NetNewsWire folders in your ~/Library/Scripts/Application directory. Unless you are partial to NetNewsWire’s own Script menu, in which case you are looking for ~/Library/Application Support/NetNewsWire/Scripts.

[Big hat-tips to Dylan]not apple mail, not mail.app, yojimbo, netnewswire, pukka, delicious, urls, web archives, tags, applescript

If, for some reason, you don’t use MailTags but like the ability to link to Mail.app messages in other apps, LinkABoo is the app for you.

Carsten Blüm has just released an updated version that now supports IMAP accounts.

That is to say, it works by linking to the locally-cached copy of an IMAP email.

UPDATE: The developer emails to assure me that the links will remain intact even if the local cache has to be rebuilt. So it’s a move-proof, rebuild-proof solution for IMAP users.

You can drop the hyperlinks which the app creates into any app that supports the feature, among them Yojimbo, SOHO Notes and other PIMs, productivty apps like Easy Task Manager, iCal and more.

He has also produced an animated GIF which demonstrates how the hyperlinks work.

The LinkABoo beta is freeware and available from Carsten’s web site .hyperlinks, mail.app, apple mail, yojimbo, ical, productivity, easytask, GTD

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.yojimbo, productivity, mail.app, tagging, hyperlinks, personal imformation manager, PIM, apple mail