Yojimbo, a new Mac OS X app from Bare Bones Software. Another notetaker, but it's impressive in how it manages to have just the basic features you would want, and not much more. It feels like software done right: They took a close look at what people actually did with notetakers—or poor substitutes, like my folder of software serial numbers—then optimized for those use cases. It's fast, it's clean, it's simple, and it could eat into OmniOutliner and DevonThink for common tasks—though I'm convinced I would use OmniOutliner heavily in addition to Yojimbo, if it came to that.

Yojimbo is $39. C'mon, people: $29 is the price point at which I will buy any Mac OS X application on a whim. If Textmate were $29 US instead of almost $50, I'd have purchased three copies by now. Thankfully, for $39 you're allowed to install Yojimbo on multiple Macs (for use by a single user), a smart pricing scheme designed for a major use case: one person with multiple Macs. With its .Mac integration, Yojimbo has a multi-site, all-Mac workflow built right in.

I'm still hoping to figure out how to integrate any of these tools into a multi-site, multi-platform workflow. Right now I'm using a little web app I wrote myself to maintain notes from two locations on three platforms. It drives me nuts that I can't use even the simplest Mac OS X productivity app beyond 10% efficiency because I don't use the same computer for work as I do for home. Seems like I need a Mac Mini and VNC to do what I want. Yojimbo currently lacks scriptability, though I assume it'll get some right quick.

P.S. Shouldn't Yojimbo's features be built into the Finder? Shouldn't I be able to browse, edit and search folders of simple RTF files (and web archives and URLs—and source code, and outlines... and e-mail... and Usenet posts...) this way?