Yojimbo fans, rejoice! 2.0 is finally here!

Waiting for Yojimbo 2.0 has been a bit like being Linus van Pelt waiting for the Great Pumpkin to arrive, but today the patient and faithful have been rewarded.

Yojimbo is a "digital junk drawer" to put all kinds of information: pictures, bookmarks, web archives, regular text, or (its crown jewel for me) that seemingly endless pile of registration codes for software. My favorite feature is the Quick Input Panel which lets me quickly and easily throw things into the "junk drawer" which means that I use it almost without thinking about it. See the Yojimbo Tour for an overview or checkout the introductory movie (QuickTime) if you haven't seen Yojimbo in action.

The 2.0 version brings several new features and improvements, most notably a new "Tag Explorer" which lets you drill down into items you have saved with various tags. (Yojimbo users will also be glad to know that tag management has been improved too.) The Quick Input Panel, Save to Yojimbo, and Drop Dock have also been improved. (See What's new in Yojimbo 2.0 for more.)

Yojimbo used to be one of my favorite and most-often used applications; however, trouble with syncing via .Mac (which neither the Bare Bones excellent support folks nor the .Mac support folks could solve) eventually led me to abandon it. So my first step today was looking at the detailed release notes. I had to read all the way to the bottom to see: "Miscellaneous changes to improve reliability of MobileMe syncing." And there was much rejoicing!

Current users (individual, family, or educational) can upgrade for $20. New licenses are available for $29 (educational), $39 (individual), or $69 (family) through the Bare Bones online store.

UPDATE: Yojimbo 1.5.2 was also released today. If you are using a 1.5.x version of Yojimbo, use the "Check For Updates" feature to download the update.

WeatherCal is a nifty Preference Pane app from Bare Bones (of BBEdit and Yojimbo fame) that adds the ability to get weather forecasts in iCal by creating all-day events for each day with the relevant information (forecast plus high and low temperatures).

You can add different cities, each of which gets its own iCal calendar and you get forecasts up to 4 days in advance. And since iCal events obviously sync to the iPhone, you can take the forecast with you.

WeatherCal is $10 from Bare Bones Software; a demo version is available for download.

[via Macworld]

BBEdit has released its eponymous BBEdit 9 text editor, a major update that includes a rewritten project manager, improvements to search and document comparison features, and a text-completion tool.

Find and Multi-File search are now separate commands, both available from the Search menu. The dialog boxes are also now non-modal! Welcome to the 20th century. Also gone is the mysterious "don't find" button.

Text completion appears much like the system-wide F5 trick: a pause will bring up a little pop-up menu of likely options. However, users can change the behavior to only show the menu with a click or keystroke.

Also included in the update is improved language support for JavaScript, Objective C, Obj-C++, Ruby, and YAML. The release notes are enormous, and if you have any niggling irritations with prior versions of BBEdit, they may very well be solved.

BBEdit is $129 for new users, and $30 for owners of existing licenses. Anyone who purchased BBEdit 8.5 and above on or after January 1 gets a free upgrade.

[Via Macworld]

Mailsmith is an old-school, text-only email client from Bare Bones (of BBEdit and Yojimbo fame), that has long had a cadre of devoted users, but which has also really been showing its age of late (version 2.1.5 was released in March 2005). Yesterday, however, Bare Bones' Rich Siegel announced a public beta of Mailsmith 2.2 that brings the application into the Intel age as well as adding a variety of other changes, including substantial changes to disk storage formats which preclude downgrading back to 2.1. Siegel emphasizes that 2.2 is not yet for sale and is completely unsupported, but if you're an old Mailsmith user who moved away in the Intel age you may want to check out the announcement.

[Via Daring Fireball]

Update: fixed links to the announcement. Here's a FTP link to the demo of Mailsmith 2.2 (via Hawk Wings)

While it isn't a major release that adds big features like tagging or AppleScript support, Yojimbo 1.4.1 does fix a lot of miscellaneous bugs that users have been battling. A full changelog is here, listing fixes for things like crashes when viewing web archives and some scripting operations, as well as an auto-save fix to make sure your most recent un-saved changes don't get tossed out with the bath water when you quit.

Yojimbo 1.4.1 can be had from from Bare Bones's Updates page.

Attention, Bare Bones fans. Maintenance updates have been released for both BBEdit and TextWrangler. You can grab them both here.

Since these are maintenance updates, don't expect new features or extra bells and whistles, just a general tidying up of things. Both are free updates.

[Via Macworld]

Bare Bones Software has released version 1.4 of Yojimbo, their "effortless information organizer" that is oh so popular with the kids these days. To summarize the press release, the main new addition is long-requested "extensive" support for automation via AppleScript and Perl. Also in this release is a new "Untagged Items" factory smart collection to go along with the still somewhat new tagging feature they released with v1.3.

Of course, plenty of bug fixes and refinements also made it into this release, all of which you can view in the release notes. You can snag the new version from Bare Bones' updates page.

Late last week, Bare Bones released an update to their excellent junk drawer app, Yojimbo, bringing it up to verison 1.3. I was going to post about it, but a hiccup in my database was preventing me to use the new version (I blame recent .Mac errors, as I'm having all sorts of syncing issues with other apps). Now that I've settled everything, however, I can honestly say this is one of the most pleasing and significant updates to a strong application. In addition to the typical bug fixes and behavior tweaks (you can see the extensive list of changes here), one of the many major additions is tags - users can now tag notes in Yojimbo, complete with support for searching by tags and smart tag collections (and a new Tags management panel in the preferences. Peep the screenshot:

As you can see, not only did Bare Bones add tag support, but they did it right. Tags are separated by commas as opposed to restrictive spaces (I'm looking at you, del.icio.us), and yes - that's a Tag Collection you see below my Serial Numbers group (bonus points for still allowing users to change a Tag Collection's folder icon via the Inspector). I honestly can't say enough good things about the addition of tags to Yojimbo, but I need to leave room for the other major additions I mentioned, such as list and table formatting in notes, easy link creation (for both URLs and file system links), a new UI for the Item Details bar (which you can see includes an area for tags), and much, much more. If you're a Yojimbo user, or someone who's still looking for a good junk drawer app, I highly recommend this new version, as Yojimbo is really beginning to shape up well.

Barebones has just updated the recently released BBEdit 8.5 (it is now 8.5.1). This is a maintenance release, but there are a few additions, mostly to snippets, so check it out. You can also be sure some bugs are squashed, and that stability has been increased.

Text hackers, get to downloading!

The Apple Developer Connection spoke with the folks at Bare Bones about Yojimbo, their application for organizing just about everything, and how Apple technologies made it possible. Core Data, Sync Services, and Cocoa created the perfect storm, in the form of Tiger, that combined to form Yojimbo, after some work in Xcode and Interface Builder that is.

An interesting article about a very clever app.

Yojimbo, the information collection app from Bare Bones Software that helps you 'master the onslaught', has been updated to version 1.2. Among the additions and improves are a Quick Start movie for new users that launches on first startup, search term highlighting, browser bookmarklets for one-click bookmarking or web archiving in Yojimbo, AppleScript importing and much more.

A 30-day fully functioning demo is available, while Bare Bones offers full single user, family and educational licenses for $39, $69 and $29, respectively.

BBEdit isn't just a program, it is a way of life. Certainly that is the sense that you get from the legion of people that swear by it. If you are a new initiate to the cult of BBEdit perhaps BBEdit Gems is just what you have been looking for.

BBEdit Gems is a site completely devoted to covering the ins and outs of BBEdit and tips and tricks to get the most out of this text editor.

As an aside, BBEdit Lite, the non-trial stripped-down free version, is no longer developed but still available and works on 10.4.4 (PowerPC) with no problems.

I wrote about Yojimbo (and revealed my ignorance of Japanese phrases) when it first came out, but my post was far from a review. Matt Neuburg has taken Yojimbo for a spin, and overall he likes what he sees. He agrees that there is a very slight learning curve, and that Yojimbo provides a user with a number of ways.

However, all is not sunshine and unicorns. Yojimbo's simplicity is a two edged sword, since the application doesn't offer much to sway people from leaving their current workflows behind. Plus, it isn't AppleScriptable.

[via Daring Fireball]

Yojimbo is the latest offering from Barebones Software, makers of BBEdit and TextWrangler. Don't let the silly name fool you, though, this application means business. Meant to allow you to organize the 'other stuff' in your life, this app is basically a filing system for websites, PDF's, product serial numbers, and any other random bits of text you might have.

It includes a built in search function, encryption for individual 'entries,' .Mac syncing, and lots of other Tiger goodness baked in (it requires 10.4.3 to run).

It is an Universal application that is available today for $39 for a single user licence ($29 bucks for educational users) or $69 for a family pack.

Update: It seems that Yojimbo actually is a Japanese word (I thought it was just made up because in my mind I heard 'Yo, Jimbo!' whenever I read it. I wasn't being culturally insensitive, I was just clueless (something I excel at). Thanks to everyone for pointing out my mistake.