Software can save you from drudgery

A while back, I blogged about the problems of information overload:

What I’d like to do is bring those programs together, to share a folder structure or tag system between mail, RSS and Web. That means when I’m doing Mag X’s news section, I can access all the material I need by clicking on the appropriate folder, irrespective of its source.

I think I might have found a solution: Yojimbo. It can’t handle my Entourage emails (or if it can, I haven’t worked out how to do it yet) but I can drag and drop things from firefox and netnewswire, store serial numbers, scribble notes, archive web pages and encrypt data, and while I haven’t had the chance to play with it for too long my initial impression is that it kicks more arse than a giant metal millipede at an arse-kicking contest.

Extra kudos to Bare Bones Software for having a category called “Pirates” in the official screenshot.

The software’s free to try and then $39 for a single user, multiple machine licence, and if it’s even half as good as it seems to be then it’s twice as good as the notorious do-gooder Mrs Good of Good Street, Goodtown, Goodland.

Update

Although it doesn’t seem as if I can drag Entourage emails directly into Yojimbo, I can drag and drop the text of emails. Which is almost as good.


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0 responses to “Software can save you from drudgery”

  1. tm

    Oh and whence the comment spell checking enhancement to your blog engine?

    I wish I could spell…

  2. tm

    hmm, but how many of us really need such an application? I suppose that I could use one in general browsing in searching, but my need for it is so infrequent that actually dragging all that stuff in there wouldn’t be worth it for the number of times I look at it.

  3. > how many of us really need such an application?

    There’s only one of me, and 100% of me needs it :)

    > dragging all that stuff in there wouldn’t be worth it for the number of times I look at it.

    Well, it’s not just for web stuff – it’s an information organiser full stop. I’ve been dragging in word docs, plaintext, PDFs…

  4. tm

    >Well, it’s not just for web stuff

    Oh yeah, I was taking that itno account. It *still* wouldn’t be useful enough to justify it for me. What I’m really saying is that you still have to collate the stuff manually and unless pretty much constantly have a large amount of stuff to collate the cost outweighs the benefit.

  5. True, but by “drudgery” I meant “a large amount of stuff to collate, constantly” :)

  6. I’ve been meaning to download this for ages, but I’ve been so overloaded I haven’t had time to.

  7. I love me some BBEdit so I can certainly believe this is all that.

  8. Stephen, did you ever look into the whole Getting Things Done approach (43Folders goes on about it a lot)? There’s some interesting ideas there.

    (assuming your overloaded comment was true rather than a bad joke ;-))

  9. tm

    >but by “drudgery”

    Sorry, I got distracted and accidentally posted that before I was finished yesterday. I meant to then say: And only a limtied number of people – for example journalists – have to do this all the time.

    i.e. it sounds like nice step forward for you, sadly not much help to the rest of us. I guess we’ll have to wait for the context sensitive version of spotlight next, and then no doubnt we’ll all be paranoid and complain about it tracking our every move anyway ;-)

  10. What sort of stuff is it you need to keep track of? QuickSilver’s like Spotlight on steroids…

  11. Am I the only one wondering why it’s called Yojimbo? Does it play your infomation off itself and then leave it decimated?

  12. I was wondering (not that I’ve seen the film, but…). It’s a strange choice of name.