Saturday, November 18, 2006

Yojimbo: the fatal flaw

Bare Bones Software's Yojimbo is one of many snippet/fragment/knowledge management tools for OS X. It's produced by a great software firm and has many keen fans. Alas, it fails the first acid test for a knowledge store -- it uses a proprietary back end data store. Yojimbo suffers from data lock. Here's the note I received when I asked about their data store (quick response btw):
...You can export all your Yojimbo info at any time by going to the Library, doing a "Select All" and then using File -> Export...

Yojimbo takes all reasonable measures to preserve info on export, e.g. PDFs and web archives export as the corresponding files, notes which contain images will be exported as .rtfd documents, etc., although exporting does not/cannot preserve Yojimbo-specific metadata such as collection
membership, tags, or labels
...

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