You know, after all these years online, I’ve realized I’m the traditional type. When I find something interesting online, say a nice article on typography or an inspirational CSS snippet, I don’t del.icio.us it or whatever: I want to save it somewhere in my computer and keep it away from all the bad Server Errors and Bandwidth Exceeded messages.
That, and the fact that I amass a huge amount of information over the day, led me to use some kind of PIM (Personal Information Manager) to keep it all in order. So far, I’ve used Yojimbo, Soho Notes and Together. But Together wins.
Why?
- I love the ability of dragging and dropping stuff to a shelf on the edge of the screen, instantly saving them. All three apps offer this kind of functionality, but I found that Together approach suited me better. Yojimbo is the worst in this aspect, I think, I remember not being able to import images directly to my library, which well, sucks.
Dragging ‘n’ dropping to save notes in Together
- Soho Notes is so, so bloated. It is full of features I never use (Contact Manager anyone?). It sure does what I want (and a ton more), but it was so sloooooooow after a while. Plus, it uses OpenBase. I mean come on. When I installed Leopard, I had forgotten to make a backup of my notes library, and I was looking for it for about two weeks. Seriously.
Soho Notes: too much bloat
- Together is intuitive, plus I love its Portrait Preview pane. It supports nested folders, tags, smart folders, all kinds of notes and snippets, and it’s very lightweight and fast to boot.
A sample window of Together, me likes
If you’re in the lookout for a nice, simple and effective PIM application which support .Mac syncing, download Together and give it a chance. It’ll make your life easier and far more orderly.
8 comments on this post
Ross Johnson #1
13.Jun.08
Interesting, I will have to try out Together. I have been using delicious for some time now, and love it for some reasons and hate it for others. It seems too hard to develop any sort of worthwhile organization, the tagging just doesn’t do it for me and often times I end up sorting through pages to find an article based on WHEN I bookmarked it rather than anything else.
Together looks like a great piece of software, thanks for the recommendation.
Sugar #2
13.Jun.08
@Ross: It’s really, really useful for storing stuff. Only thing it lacks is serial support, that Soho Notes has, but oh well.
Highly recommended overall.
stelabouras #3
13.Jun.08
Excellent post!
I will give it a try, thnx!
porcupine #4
13.Jun.08
If you think that Together is better than Yojimbo, then I should give it a try.
However very often you have to cross check your bookmarks from different computers and then it’s delicious (Magnolia anyone?) that saves your life.
Sugar #5
13.Jun.08
@porcupine
I don’t get the idea of storing bookmarks, I’ve never done. It’s like this for me: nice article on something, stored into Together, nice blog or something with RSS, stored in Google Reader.
infowonders #6
13.Jun.08
I’m using Evernote and I find it very useful. It’s for PC, Mac, phone, or web-based.
Here’s a Comparison Chart for all the above applications.
Sugar #7
13.Jun.08
@infowonders
Evernote is a cool idea, but its web clipping functionality sucks. Essentially, it strips the CSS off the page, which in my book, is not the smartest way of clipping stuff.
Till it improves its clipping functionality it’s essentially useless for me.
Filtering information flow #813.Jun.08
[...] very well turn out to be the perfect for your needs so you should try them. ( Sugar is apparently a happy ‘Together’ user [...]