I use Yojimbo on my ersonal laptop and in my work-a-day life at
Oracle Corproation as their Interoperability Evangelist.
But I am writing from my personal account lest someone construe these
opinions to represent those of Oracle besides my own.
Let me state first and foremost that I seriously like Yojimbo (though
not as much as I like BBEdit).
I think it provides me with a powerful tool to aggregate and
consolidate sources of information on a particular topic cleanly and
in an easily-retrievable way.
I almost like it as much as the eponymous Toshiro Mifune/Akiro
Kurosawa film that undoubtedly inspired its name. Almost.
But unlike Tsubaki Sanjuro's (or what ever his name was in that film)
blade, it doesn't cut cleanly. It needs 'its soul polished' (obscure
reference to the Samurai Trilogy films telling the tale of the life
Musashi Miyamoto, the greatest japanese swordsman whoever lived,
starring guess who and directed by guess who).
How so you might ask?
1. Full Synchornization: when I sync Yojimbo between my laptop and
desktop, only data is synchronized. My tags and collections are not--
this is extremely vexing. My tags and collections are not _machine_
attributes--they are my personal attributes and represent personal
organization of data I want for my life--regardless of which system I
am accessing Yojimbo from. This defect alone spurs me to consider
migrating off the Yojimbo platform and writing my own tool in Java
that would be cross platform.
Aside: as rich as Cocoa/ObjC is, it is a monolithic architecture
tied to one minority platform and I shun it for that reason alone.
When will Mac developers have the guts to stand up to Apple and
demand cross-platform support? Or will they wait for us users to
leave their applications first? Apple could make Java work if they
wanted to. The Java/Cocoa bridge died by design not technical
impossibility.
2. Hierarchical categorization: why is there just one 'flat file'
level to the folders and collections? You have a powerful search
which pierces to most arcane and labyrinthine of hierarchies and
categorizations? So why
3. HTMl Export: I use Yojimbo to make notebooks on subjects I am
researching, projects I am outlining, and to collect data for
reference. As the Yojimbo data base grows it becomes ungainly and
when a topic is complete and mostly read-only, I'd like to be able to
export it to HTML to host it on my local web (built in to OS X Users
account) for easy reference in a read-only mode.
I hope this critique is taken in the right context. I like this
product and I only want it to better serve me and everyone else who
uses it.
Sincerely,
Daniel Lord
- Key Missing Features Daniel Lord
-
