Over the weekend I had some time to mess about with the new version of Yojimbo. It’s an excellent update, and the new tagging feature is particularly appealing for one important reason.
The new version upgrades your Yojimbo database
The concept of tags in OS X isn’t new. But in some apps, simply adding tags, or applying them to data, is hard work in itself. Situations where tags appear in a palette or a drawer, and tagging data is done by drag-and-drop or by checking checkboxes, are all too common. And much too slow. That’s why I’ve not keyworded much of my iPhoto library (or at least I hadn’t until I got my hands on Keyword Assistant).
I prefer tags to be something I type into a single field, comma-separated, freeform, faster. I like del.icio.us style tags.
Tagging in the Quick Input Panel
And that’s pretty much what you get in the new Yojimbo. If you import stuff using Yojimbo’s Quick Input Panel, the tags field there behaves just like one at del.icio.us. Creating a new tag is as simple as typing it. The behaviour is the same in each entry’s Details Bar.
Editing tags in the Details Bar
This bar also offers quick access to the Encrypt command (previously hidden away in the Menu bar), and lets you edit a note’s title without having to open the Inspector panel.
There’s a new command to quickly create a tag-based smart folder, called a Tag Collection.
Overall, a very worthwhile and feature-packed update.
On first impressions, agree entirely, excellent implementation.
One small reservation about the smart tag collection feature though; I can see after a few months hard tagging, losing track of some tags - auto complete within the New Tag Collection window is excellent but some form of ability to reference all tags at that point and in the quick input panel might ensure none have been forgotten or mis-spelt and duplicated.
Having to open the preferences window to access the complete list seems a bit clumsy.
Still no hierarchical tags which are far more useful. If I tag something with Jazz, a Music tag should be implied as long as I maintain a tag hierarchy that indicates this.
I would still vastly prefera proper OS X styled "Smart Collection" implementation (as in Finder & Mail's Smart Folders and/or iTunes' playlists) rather than this intermediary step of manual tagging. The simple fact that I can't, for example, create a Smart Collection of serial key entries by having defined the type to be serial, let alone encrypt a serial type, makes Yojimbo live up to the company's name that created it. Tagging is nice feature, but at the moment, it's still making me spend more time managing my Personal Information Manager program as I manually sort things within it than I should be.
Is there any substantial difference between Yojimbo and Nifty Box?
There's only one problem - you can apply tags, but you cannot _add_ tags; that is, you can't tag a bunch of items with one tag, then add a second tag to half of them. Doing so deletes the first tag. That's a big failure in my opinion (and I'm a big fan of the program...)