Great Moments by Design - Yojimbo Spotlight Integration
Today’s installment comes courtesy of a third party application for OS X. Yojimbo by Barebones Software is an organizer app that gives you a place to store various types of information. Here’s a summary of the application from the Barebones website:
Yojimbo makes keeping all the small (or even large) bits of information that pour in every day organized and accessible. It’s so simple, there is no learning curve. Yojimbo’s mechanism for collecting, storing and finding information is so natural and effortless, it will change your life—without changing the way you work.
I’ve been using this application for over a year now and it has incorporated nicely with my GTD system. It gives me the perfect place to store and archive project related information. I also use it to store notes and ideas when brainstorming about any project or area in my life.
The feature in focus today is the way Yojimbo items integrate with OS X. Yojimbo is a Core Data application and so stores all of it’s information in a SQLite database, making each entry indexable and searchable via OS X’s Spotlight interface.
After reading recently about using smart folders to access project information, I realized I could do the same with Yojimbo items, as shown below:
The ability to access the information contained within Yojimbo without having to navigate to the application is a big plus for me. There are a lot of methods to use Yojimbo this way (hotkeys, the Drop Dock, system wide Services menu for examples), but Spotlight and the Finder make Yojimbo usage that much more transparent and enjoyable. It is a simple and well designed application.
