digital organizers

[kareila]

This is a topic I've had at the back of my mind for quite a while but haven't explored until today.

I got an email from Delicious reminding me that their site is migrating and all my data is belong to them. Since I used it more as a simple organizer for my own bookmarks than anything else, I'm looking at Mac software that will more flexibly fill that same gap, plus allow me to organize stuff I've starred in Google Reader and stashed in temporary files on my desktop. A digital junk drawer, if you will.

Here are the contenders I've unearthed so far:

• Evernote: web based, free for basic use, $5/mo otherwise
• Yojimbo: $40
• Together: $40
• EagleFiler: $40
• DEVONthink Personal: $50
• ShoveBox: $25

(DEVONthink was previously mentioned in our writing tools thread as well.)

Together and EagleFiler use the file system for storage and organization, which means you can access your data in the Finder and Spotlight as well as within their applications, and their libraries easily integrate with Dropbox for backup and browser access.

The other four all have iOS companion apps: Evernote free, Yojimbo $10, DEVONthink $15, ShoveBox $4. The Yojimbo iOS client is read-only.

Evernote is unusual in that it stores all of your info on the web and either you pay a service fee or you see ads. That means you can access your information from any web browser, but it raises the issues of privacy and data portability. The others have free trial versions that expire after a certain period of time.

Thanks to MacHeist, I already have license keys for ShoveBox and the previous major version of DEVONthink Personal. I will try those first and if neither one satisfies me, I'll probably try Evernote after that.

If you have experience with any of these or a different alternative to recommend, leave a comment!

Comments

[holyschist]

Evernote does allow you to make private folders and notes that are NOT synced with the web version--so they're only available on your home computer and must be backed up manually, but OTOH, they aren't floating around in the cloud.

I actually don't use the web version much and I find the ads in the desktop client pretty unintrusive. But I mostly use Evernote for storing things like booklists and passwords and whatnot, not for links. I am not sure it would be great for storing bookmarks.

[kareila]

Thanks, that's good to know!

As for bookmarks, I'm storing web sites that I /don't/ access frequently, but I read them that one time and wanted to be able to find them again, y'know? I may just end up organizing them in descriptively named text files, but I'd prefer something that made it slightly easier to revisit the links.

[firecat]

I have used yojimbo as my digital junk drawer for a while now. I haven't tried the iOS version. When I was syncing with MobileMe a while back yojimbo wasn't playing nice with it, but that might have been fixed by now. I really like being able to print PDFs to yojimbo.

[floatboth]

Evernote is cool for capturing ideas or keeping scanned documents (searching text on photos!), also voice notes. And sharing stuff.

I don't use Evernote as an everything bucket – there's Pinboard for web bookmarks, iCloud (iOS Reminders, iCal/Anxiety for Mac) for to-dos and 1Password for confidential info. Just ideas and docs.

[kareila]

Yep, I also have separate apps for password management and to-dos, and I use my email inbox for short term idea management. The gap I'm looking to cover is long term storage of snippets of things I don't want to lose track of, and Evernote might be a good fit for that, even if most of what I want to put into it at first will be URLs.

I had looked at Pinboard when the Delicious sale was first announced, and decided I probably wouldn't use it for the same reason I had stopped making new bookmarks in Delicious: the tag cloud eventually becomes overwhelming. Either I end up with too few tags covering too many bookmarks (like my "macosx" tag), or each bookmark gets a unique tag that I can't remember later. So I gave up on Delicious completely and just starred everything I wanted to save for later in Google Reader.

[vlion]

emacs org-mode is epically useful.

You know, if you like Emacs. :-)

[kareila]

I do! Although I haven't used it as much as I used to since I got BBEdit.