Bare Bones Software has released Yojimbo 1.5 which features an information collector and organizer with Smart Collections, tags, a Drop Dock, live search, Spotlight support, encryption for individual items, Sync Services support, and other features. This release is Leopard compatible and adds support for image and icon files, faster searching and filtering, more complete Spotlight results, and other changes.

Yojimbo makes keeping all the small (or even large) bits of information that pour in every day organized and accessible. It’s simple with practically no learning curve. Yojimbo 1.5 has replaced SOHO Notes on my Macs.

I was a long time user of Chronos Sticky Brain and then SOHO Notes its official successor. But I have found SOHO Notes to be buggy, slow and a bit bloated. Sure it has more features than Yojimbo, but I just hated the performance and buggy application that SOHO Notes had become.

In fact I hated the performance so much I actually stopped using it entirely for awhile. I never bought the upgrade from 5.5.1 to the latest version. After upgrading to Leopard I decided to download the latest 6.5.3 trial version, importing my notes and trying it out hoping for a better experience. If you have ever used any of the Mac based “personal information managers” (PIM) you do get hooked on them for the added productivity that can bring.

I have tried several of these PIM applications like Yojimbo, Devonthink Pro, SOHO Notes, and Journler. All of these apps have pluses and minuses. The one feature I can not live without is syncing between the several Macs I use on an everyday basis. I want an application that when I save a snippet of information on my work Mac, it will automatically be there when I get home. This is the main reason I subscribe yearly to Apple’s .Mac.

Well the one feature of .Mac syncing across all my Macs brings the crowded field of PIM applications (and there are many great choices) down to just two – SOHO Notes and Yojimbo. These are ones I found that offer this feature I can not live without. I wish Devonthink Pro would add this feature.

Well my experience with even the latest SOHO Notes 6.5.3 on two new Leopard Intel Macs was still too slow and too unpredictable. The syncing between Macs was not as reliable as it should be. So with being faced with paying for the $25 upgrade price of SOHO Notes, I opted to spend $39 for Yojimbo 1.5 instead. I exported my notes from SOHO Notes and imported them into Yojimbo, without any problems. I have Yojimbo loaded and synced between three Macs and it seems to be performing quite well.

I like the fact that Yojimbo uses core Mac OS X technologies to store data, as opposed to SOHO which installs Open Base on your machine. Like SOHO Notes you can store almost anything in Yojimbo—text, rich text, images, PDFs, even serial numbers and passwords. It is like a big digital file cabinet that will help you organize your stuff and retrieve it fast.

Getting stuff into Yojimbo is pretty easy. There is a Drop Dock that sits on the side of your screen allowing you to drag and drop things. Simply copy something, press F8 (needs to be changed for Leopard users as F8 is for Spaces. I changed mine to F6), name the item and type and click “Create”. You can use OS X’s Services menu or use Yojimbo’s File menu to add info. You will also find that you can save as a PDF to Yojimbo in the OS X print menu.

I have not used Yojimbo long enough to give it a full fledged review. But after using Sticky Brain and then SOHO Notes, I can already see that sometimes “less is more.” Yojimbo covers the features I need the most, without the glut of SOHO Notes, but best of all the applications performance is far superior. Yojimbo does not seem to slow down my machine and best of all it does not slow ME down. Since Bare Bones offers a free trial, give Yojimbo a spin.

Quicksilver users will find that there is a plugin for Yojimbo.

Yojimbo is $39 single user for multiple Macs. They also offer a Family Pack at $69 that allows up to 5 users in a single household and a $29 Educational version. Bare Bones offers a fully-featured and functional demo version to offer a true test of the software as it is identical to the retail version. It expires after 30 days and can be activated with a serial number upon purchase.

Yojimbo Universal Binary for Intel and PPC Mac s running OS X 10.4.3 and up, including Leopard.

Yojimbo is awarded 4 out of 5 Paws

    | Tags: Macintosh, Software, yojimbo