Geeze, those MacZOT guys either have strangely coincidental timing, or I need to consider changing the locks on my house. This is either the second or third time that I discovered and thoroughly enjoyed an app, only to find it go on sale at MacZOT the next day (i.e. - I'm buying a license as I type this). The app in question is yFlicks, which we wrote about back in January (and I probably missed because of all the Macworld craziness). yFlicks is more or less a really cool 'iPhoto for your movies,' allowing you to organize and rate your movie files, as well as update the metadata associated with them. This is a great thing if, like me, you're switching from iPhoto to Aperture, because one drawback of the latter is that it doesn't import or organize movies shot with a digital camera.

But yFlicks does some great stuff I've never seen in a full-on movie organizer before: it offers live video previews when you mouse over the thumbnail (so you don't have to open each movie just to get a look at it), complete support for the Apple Remote, a bookmarklet for downloading movies from popular communities like YouTube, Daily Motion and College Humor, and even a great temporary folder system that doesn't simply copy every movie into your movies folder when playing it, allowing you to pick and chose which movies you actually keep and catalog.

The great thing about yFlicks is that the cleverness doesn't stop there; its developer, Peter Maurer - who Mat Lu pointed out in January has developed a ton of other great Mac apps, has sprinkled all sorts of handy magic throughout yFlicks, from a simple rotate button for movies that were shot with the camera rotated to Smart Folders for organizing your flicks and even one-click access to viewing your movie file in its location in the Finder. In fact, I'm so happy with yFlicks, I'm still buying it straight from Mr. Maurer. If you want to save some cash though, yFlicks is on a 40% sale today at MacZOT: its U.S. price is typically $20, but today-only it's just $11.95. That's a killer deal on one of the best darn movie organizing apps I've ever seen.

Of course, before you decide, you can grab a demo from Many Tricks, Peter Maurer's software company, and take it for a spin before throwing down your cash.

Last week, Mat Lu found a Quicksilver plugin that plays well with Stikkit, the online personal info organizer that thinks so you don't have to, but there's also another method for all you Dashboard junkies out there: a full-on widget from James Adam. This widget, like its Quicksilver plugin cousin, is great for getting your stuff into Stikkit, but it also has the advantage of being a compact window into your Stikkit world. You can create or edit any number of Stikkits and sync them when you want, making this widget a sort of offline, syncing client for Stikkit.

Adam is providing this widget free of charge, and you can grab your copy from his interblah.net site (love the domain Adam!).

[via Stikkit's Values of n Blog]

StickyBrain, one of the leading 'digital junk drawer' apps that recently entered a 4.1 beta testing phase, has been officially discontinued by Chronos in favor of SOHO Notes 5.5. Current registered users of StickyBrain 4.0 will receive an upgrade to SOHO Notes for free, while users who own licenses for any previous StickyBrain versions (1.x, 2.x and 3.x) can upgrade to SOHO Notes 5.5 for a mere $25, the price offered in the past for upgrading from StickyBrain 3.x to 4.x.

Why is StickyBrain being dissolved in favor of SOHO Notes, you ask? Chronos has published an announcement and FAQ explaining the decision, but here's the short version: SOHO Notes is basically the big brother of StickyBrain; they're almost the same app, derived from the same codebase, except SOHO Notes included three key features that Chronos used to charge extra for:

• SOHO Notes can synchronize notes between multiple computers using a .Mac account (seamlessly, in the background).
  
• SOHO Notes can access multiple note databases simultaneously.
• SOHO Notes is multi-user capable which means users can share notes with others over a network using the product's client/server technology.

Now, with SOHO Notes taking the helm, its price has dropped to $39.99 to keep it more in-line with StickyBrain's previous price, as well as the competition like Yojimbo and DEVONthink.

Feature-wise, this new version of SOHO Notes 5.5 offers some powerful new goodies, such as the ability to import and catalog almost any kind of file, send notes to your blog, a DockNote that makes it easy to get info both in and out, audio recording notes, full-screen editing of notes, a Daily Journal/Diary category that can automatically date/time stamp notes and much more.

Whether you love your hate StickyBrain SOHO Notes, this should be good news for the 'digital junk drawer' market, as this price drop and the new features should help keep everyone's innovative juices flowing.

Oh so sweet. My favorite catch-all notepad and organizer, VoodooPad, has been updated to version 3.0 today. I fell in love with VoodooPad about two years ago when I started a new job and needed to start keeping track of a huge variety of different kinds of information. I started dumping everything I could into the program--scraps of technical support information, dates and details of computer repairs, website URL's, coworkers' phone extensions, serial numbers. I didn't really know right away if VoodooPad was going to help keep all this stuff organized, but after awhile I noticed that I started to rely on the software to track down that information that otherwise would have been misplaced. I also started to notice connections between information that I might not have otherwise made.

VoodooPad sports a number of new features including tabs, searching improvements, support for big documents, and new filetype embedding. There's also support for Mac OS X's PDF framework so you can print a PDF straight into VoodooPad.

VoodooPad Pro is a new edition to the family that has several advanced options for power-users such as encryption, triggers, metadata inclusion, and a built-in web server to facilitate collaboration between VoodooPad users.

Other programs, like Yojimbo, have popped up recently to serve as the same kind of catch-all, but I remain faithful to VoodooPad, my first love. It saved me from the growing rat's nest that was StickyBrain. Mojo, indeed.

The Omni Group has finalized version 3.6 of OmniOutliner and OmniOutliner Pro, their "amazingly flexible program for creating, collecting, and organizing information." The final version itself doesn't usher in any mind-blowing new features aside from the built-in help being fully localized, but check out their release notes for all the new features they rolled out in previous 3.6 beta releases if you haven't been keeping up.

Version 3.6 is a free upgrade for existing 3.0 customers, and is available from the Omni Group's site.

We're a little late on this one, but Yojimbo, a very functional yet simple information collection tool, has been updated to version 1.1. Among the decent list of additions, changes and bugfixes are new features like:

• opening a bookmark in a preferred browser (not necessarily the default)
• applescript-ability
• search field improvements including toolbar statistics like iTunes and Mail
• improvements to dragging items to the collections list
• removing backgrounds when printing web archives
• .Mac syncing no longer requires Yojimbo to be running

I started finding all sorts of great uses for Yojimbo and actually decided to buy it last night, so I highly recommend checking it out if you've been looking for a better way to get organized.