I sure felt like I was reading a lot about information organizers or “anything / everything bucket” software over the last week. First, Bare Bones Software released Yojimbo 2.0. Shortly thereafter I read about a new version of Notational Velocity and a press release that Chronos was updating SOHO Notes with iPhone support. Before I knew it, I was googling for every article on how these apps compared to Evernote — the king of the hill as far as I was concerned.
These apps are not new — most in the category have been around for a couple years and their proponents and critics are abound. Evernote has been installed on my Mac for some time, but unfortunately had been reasonably dormant for the last few months. I decided to re-look how to better use Evernote as well as take a fresh look at Yojimbo.
If my only consideration was using a Mac desktop client app, I probably would have picked Yojimbo. I find the user interface cleaner than Evernote’s, and I really like Yojimbo’s Drop Dock and quick entry panel. I also much prefer how it exports files over Evernote (Yojimbo allows you to export all documents directly to their native formats while Evernote supports HTML and a custom XML export).
However, at the end of the day Evernote won out for me. The desktop client is close enough to matching what I like in Yojimbo yet it wins the day with its platform neutrality and one kick-ass iPhone app. It really does transform your iPhone into the ultimate capture tool, and it is Evernote’s killer feature. Case in point: I was in Costco this weekend and saw a book I thought I might want to read. I took a picture of the book in Evernote and it instantly uploaded to my Evernote library so I have it for reference the next time I am looking for something to read. Very cool.
During the process of testing out both of these apps, it sparked a number of ideas I thought would be good to share here, so you can expect a couple posts on my experiences in the upcoming weeks. If you’ve never used either Evernote or Yojimbo you should definitely give them a try.
P.S.: Here’s Evernote Tip #1: Use its note editor to capture ideas for blog posts - this post started as a one line note in Evernote. I went back to it and it turned into a blog post. That’s the first time I’ve used Evernote in that way.
