February 2009 Archives

From al3x.net:

The Mac software ecosystem faces a plague. A plague of Everything Buckets. Indulge me.

If you search for “productivity” or “organization” software for the Mac, you’ll find variations on a particular type of application. These applications claim to be “your outboard brain” or “your digital filing cabinet” or similar. They go by many names: Yojimbo, Together, ShoveBox, Evernote, DEVONthink. There may be differences in their implementation and appearance, but these applications are all of the same sinister ilk. They are Everything Buckets.

Alex Payne is off his rocker. "Everything Buckets"—a simply dreadful misnomer, by the way, that would make a marvelous title for an Oprah's Book Club selection—can be fantastic productivity tools. In fact, I use three of the five he mentions in the quote above: Shovebox as a virtual GTD Inbox; Yojimbo to store notes that then sync with my Treo; and DEVONthink as a storehouse for research projects, PDF software manuals, etc. I also use Circus Ponies Notebook as a centralized app to store my career-related brain books and to organize information for my writing projects.

Of course, I might be biased. After all, I'm pretty sure I coded the very first Mac "Everything Bucket": the packrat.