Yesterday I read that DropBox announced their new iPhone app, and it occurred to me that you could set up the Dropbox iPhone app to clip images directly into Yojimbo with very minimal effort.  I was so pumped.  This was a total game changer.

Here’s how to do it:

(Note:  I’m assuming that you have Yojimbo installed on your Mac and Dropbox installed on both your iPhone and Mac.  If not, download Dropbox here and Yojimbo here.)

1. On your Mac, create a new folder called “Clip to Yojimbo” in your Dropbox folder:

2.  Copy and past the below code into Script Editor.  This will become a folder action that runs anytime a file is added to the “Clip to Yojimbo” folder (note: you will have to enable folder actions if they are not already set up).  Save the script to your Mac’s Library/Scripts/Folder Actions folder as “import to Yojimbo” or whatever name you like.

on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving these_items
	repeat with x from 1 to the count of these_items
		set theFile to item x of these_items
		try
			tell application "Yojimbo"
				import theFile
			end tell
		end try
	end repeat
end adding folder items to

Note for Scripters:  You can certainly get a little fancier with the Applescript, i.e. move the picture to an archive folder after the import is complete, etc. but this is all you need to get the basic import done.

3.  Assign the “import to Yojimbo” folder action to the “Clip to Yojimbo” folder.

4. That’s it.  Now it is time to test it out.  Go to your iPhone, go to DropBox and navigate to the “Clip to Yojimbo” folder. Take a picture.

5. If you are at your Mac, you will see the picture almost immediately show up in the Dropbox folder.

6.  A couple seconds later, it will import right into Yojimbo.

You’re done.  Pretty cool, right?  You can watch the whole process happen in real time on your Mac if you have the Finder open to the “Clip to Yojimbo” folder alongside an open Yojimbo window.  It is almost instantaneous.  The lack of an iPhone app for Yojimbo was the reason I started using Evernote, so this is pretty exciting.   It probably just swung my decision pendulum back to using Yojimbo.

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.