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My name is Cédric Bozzi, I make apps and websites, and this is my tech blog — you’ll find news commentary here, from a very opinionated Mac-head.

Il y a une version française ici, but most of this blog’s contents are extracted from my Twitter feed, and hence only available in one language (which varies randomly).

13 jul. 2006

Productivity apps are so crude. I’ve tried doing a roundup of all the Yojimbo / StickyBrain / WhatEver crowd again, like all those GTD addicts tend to do every once in a while, in order to try and solve this little problem that’s getting more and more evident: my notes and thoughts and whatnot are scattered.

I currently write my to-do items in OmniOutliner Pro, classified by project, using named styles with keyboard shortcuts to highlight the most important and urgent items (which, to GTD aficionados, would be “next actions”, but I’m not working in that structured a way yet, and doubt I’ll ever be). Trouble is, that’s a big file, with lots of items per category, and there’s no way to display, at a glance, all the stuff I need to work on first, all my highlighted items. No smart folders or anything. (I know I could use Kinkless, but it just feels… I don’t know, awkward. Slapped on. Unnatural. And why the hell wouldn’t OOP have native smart folders?)

At the same time, I’m using Yojimbo to store web clippings — information, hints and tips of all kinds, graphical inspiration, technical and administrative reference, etc. — but there’s another problem here: I file stuff into Yojimbo, never to look back at it again. Because my notes and to-do items are in OmniOutliner, I just about never open the Yojimbo main window. Links go into the drop dock, nothing ever comes out.

What I need is to store everything in the one place, and that place to have smart folders and be able to handle web archives as well as quick notes. Even if OmniOutliner ever grew smart folders, it would necessarily remain inadequate for web archives (even if it ever grew smart folders). Yojimbo, on the other hand, isn’t quite great at managing one-line to-do items, but my biggest issue is actually that smart collections are terribly limited. You can flag and label items in your library, but the only smart collection you’re allowed to have displays flagged items — that’s not enough for me; how come they never thought we might need to search for specific labels? The most puzzling thing is, SOHOsomething and DEVONwhatever have the same limitation: little or no smart folder support. In these Tiger/Spotlight times, when Apple’s native apps support them extensively, that’s insane.

The only note-management package I could find that would support my smart collection needs is Mori, but it’s lagging on the other aspects: I find it weaker than Yojimbo at one-liner management (though I couldn’t quite pinpoint why) and, more importantly, it doesn’t do web archives, but simply creates a hyperlink when you drop a web shortcut onto it. That’s no good — you can’t trust the internet to store the information you need forever (and forever in the same place).

I’m not quite sure what the ideal program would be — designing the same interface conveniently list web archives and short to-do items wouldn’t be an easy task — but I know what would be already be a good start: Yojimbo, with the extensive, customizable smart collections it should never have shipped without (and folder hierarchy, too, to unclutter the drop dock once I create one folder per project). Isn’t that simple enough?

And there’s another thing I can’t believe is nowhere to be found: tag support. Hello? Have you looked at the web lately? Or, for that matter, do you have any idea what GTD is? You know, that might help, if you’re going to make productivity software.

[+19h] DEVONthink does have some smart folder support — but that requires the Professional version, and you have to manually link a folder to an AppleScript file… I can believe Merlin Mann calls that “drop-dead easy to use.”

# 2006-07-13 20:06:50

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13 jul. 2006

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