A good compromise for somebody like Alex, assuming he's not hell-bent on avoiding technology that might make his life easier, is EagleFiler from Michael Tsai:
One of the core philosophies of that software is to use the file system as a the backing database for the "everything" ... so a lot of Alex's arguments about database corruption, etc, go out the window.
His arguments seem to condense down to two points: some data management apps demand format lock-in, and if you try hard enough, you can invent your own solution for just about anything. The former is not true of all apps, as EagleFiler testifies, and the latter is technically true, but usually a complete waste of time and energy.
Bendit
· 10 months ago
I tried to use EagleFiler for a while, but it just seemed to act as a speed bump in getting things done. It needs to index itself, reindex itself, it needs 20 seconds to load, it needs to load a library before you can start inputting data, and it can only quick-import from certain applications (sorry, no Entourage support)
Michael Tsai
· 10 months ago
EagleFiler's quick-import hotkey works in over 40 applications, just about all the ones that people have told me they wanted to capture from. In Entourage, you can simply press F1 to import the selected messages into EagleFiler.
Bendit
· 10 months ago
Thanks Michael. I wish I could correct my comment, but I don't appear to be able to edit it.
Nicholas Riley
· 10 months ago
You need to leave EagleFiler open all the time for it to be useful - and there is now Entourage support.
Michael Tsai
· 10 months ago
EagleFilter's quick-import hotkey works in over 40 applications, essentially all the ones people have told me they wanted to capture from. In Entourage, you can just select some messages and press F1 to import them into EagleFiler.
BenR
· 10 months ago
Michael, while we're on the topic, is there any plan for proper Sync on EF, or do you have reasons why it's a Bad Idea? (I'm not into the Dropbox-and-remember-to-close-it-on-the-other-machine-first approach – Cultured Code, are you listening?)
I too am an Everything Bucket person, and Yojimbo works pretty flawlessly for me on three machines (Home, Office and PowerBook). However, its database, and the (slim?) risk of corruption has always concerned me – particularly as my "bucket" grows.
I'd not seen EagleFiler since the GUI overhaul (yes, I am that shallow), and I like what it promises, but Sync is the number one prerequisite for this kind of app to work for me.
Michael Tsai
· 10 months ago
Sorry about the duplicate reply above. It wasn't showing up, so I thought it didn't go through.
BenR: Syncing is certainly something I'm considering for a future version. I don't think it's a "Bad Idea," but it is something that has to be done with care, both for data integrity and to not add too much overhead to the application.
Evan
· 10 months ago
Word. An "everything bucket" plus search is, in my experience, miles better than tediously managing your organizational structure by hand.
And agreed, Alex's comments along the lines of "your computer wants it that way, why can't you comply?" rang as condescending to me as well.
blackant
· 10 months ago
Nice writeup. As much as I enjoy Alex's writing, I felt totally at odds with his Everything Bucket post. I agree with your points, with the difference of Yojimbo being my bucket of choice.
Daniel Jalkut
· 10 months ago
Oh yeah, I hate to hit him where it hurts, but I don't see why anybody would use Twitter when you can replicate the functionality with email and a sufficiently diverse address book.
Bendit
· 10 months ago
The Everything Buckets argument can be applied to any organizational application, not just data collectors. As is the case with to-do lists, specialized applications offer an alternative path to getting things done. Procrastinators, such as myself, can get sidetracked by the slightest annoyance.
If the workflow is unbearable to the user, then it is worth spending money on third-party applications to overcome the limitations or annoyances.
Some people use TextEdit and Finder for all their organization, some people use EagleFiler and OmniFocus.
If spending $100 improves your quality of life, or quality of work, then it’s money well spent.
To each his own.
_
· 10 months ago
He didn't urge you to do what your computer wants because it's some sort of engineering dogma, he merely said that you'll pay the price if you don't--which is simply true. If we didn't have flashy GUIs, background indexing, etc, we would instead have computers that are cheaper, faster, and use less energy. It's just a matter of trade-off. Personally, I like my Cocoa and Spotlight, but there are things that don't offer quite as good a trade.
I agree with Alex that these buckets are little more than proprietary filesystems, but unlike real filesystems, they aren't rigorously engineered for speed and reliability. They're also closed, in the sense that other applications on your computer aren't aware of their structure and can't efficiently work with the data therein. Like Alex said, you have to use its built-in text editor, built-in to-do lists, etc, which are almost always inferior to other applications running on your computer.
Spotlight allows one to put comments on files. This is a good place for tags, groups, connections, etc. Also, if I see something I'm interested in on the web, I can highlight the text, or the image, or the URL, or _, and drag it straight to my Desktop. This is what personal computers are for. Maybe there are a few things the Finder could learn from VoodooPad or Yojimbo, but overall I feel their pros don't outweigh their cons.
Daniel J. Wilson
· 10 months ago
Minor correction: the Engelbart system was known as NLS for oN-Line System.
gavinmcgovern
· 10 months ago
I wrote up a "there and back again" piece about my experiences with everything buckets: Devonthink for many years, then the filesystem with lots of special handling and now back again to Devonthink. Ultimately what pulled me back were all the nice ways of grabbing content; EagleFiler comment indicates similar ease there as well.
Do you want a native filesystem and a dozen or so specialized client apps & scripts to maintain? Or do you want a nice monolithic app that does most of what you need? Easy choice for me.
Alex Payne
· 10 months ago
Thanks for your thoughtful response, Buzz. This is exactly what I hope for when I write on the web.
Lou Lesko
· 10 months ago
I enjoyed Mr. Paynes article very much. And, I think your response is a fabulous balance to his extreme view. One tool that I have found absolutely brilliant for organizing is Leap and its partner Yep. I'm a fan of tagging. I would leave files on my desktop forever instead of putting them in an appropriate folder but I'm bizarrely diligent about tagging my files. I can only think that placing a file in a folder is a commitment to one category and tagging is not.
But the one application that has aided me the most is Voodoo Pad. It is the ultimate notebook and I recommend it highly. It is fast and nimble and very good at doing its one purpose exceedingly well.
oomu
· 10 months ago
the main point of Alex is the "everything buckets" is already in all mac: Finder and Spotlight.
and the filesystems is engineered for years to be efficient, and you can comment and relate documents by spotllght. He doesn't tell you to go back to thousands of folders and weird naming scheme.
The point is : use a good word processor, a good number application, a good adress book, let the computers index them natively.
(since spotlight, I totally stopped to create myriad of tiny hierarchical folders, I have just broad categorisations)
@luomat
· 10 months ago
His argument was simply overly broad.
DevonThink is great, but it will work better if I put all of my "Project X" things in one database and all of my "Project Y" things in another.
Yojimbo is great for storing snippets of information, but stuff enough PDFs in there and kiss syncing goodbye.
Spotlight is great, but I find it works a lot faster if I have put some of my stuff into specific folders that I can then search in, and only if I fail to find it then do I make a broader search.
And of course, Spotlight fails to do a whole lot of pattern matching that would make it more powerful.
I wouldn't throw everything into any bucket.
Nor do I want everything just laying around without any organization whatsoever.
Assuming that Alex has some folders inside his Home directory, he agrees. It's just to what extent.
kelaln
· 10 months ago
Orthogonally, your aside on Engelbart reminded me of time spent at Palm where the ability of people to learn was always the central design philosophy --people's ability to learn the graffiti notation system over the unsolved at the time (and still largely unsolved) handwriting recognition.
I'd posit that NLS merely had too steep a learning curve -- people still spend 6 months learning to use your product as long as there are useful milestones where you get value all along that curve. (and as long as a competitor can't provide 80% of the value, with a shallower learning curve, as most users will only ever use a fraction of the power of your product)
St. Chris
· 10 months ago
I see Alex's point, but I also want a bucket that I can throw stuff into effortlessly without paging mindspace to consider how my computer wants the data to be structured. Low barrier for data entry. I'll go back through it later and structure it then. Maybe. But if I don't get around to that, at least I have the data somewhere, and it is searchable.
I'm a text-heavy data-saver, and VoodooPad works great for me. Since I use it mostly as a work journal, I can (a) find past related entries with an instant search -- the text is the tags -- and (b) create an instant hyperlink to any such reference just by typing the date, since I create a new page per day with the date in the title (e.g., 090210).
proteus
· 10 months ago
I have added this post to my Evernote notebook. :)
Seriously, I'm a huge fan of taxonomy for organizing data -- which is what Alex is essentially proposing as the One True Way of being organized. But, the "everything buckets" I'm familiar with don't preclude taxonomy and structure; they just don't *require* it. That means I throw something into Evernote when all I know about it is "this is something I don't want to forget". I can always apply the structure later. Simple filesystem-based organization isn't as useful.
Besides, Alex claims that every feature of my bucket can be easily duplicated with a filesystem. Clearly, Alex has no need to port his data seamlessly between information domains, like my Windows PC at work and my Mac at home. Why would I set up the complex system (and put up with the overhead) of a remote filesystem over the Internet when Evernote works just fine?
dave
· 10 months ago
I can't deal with most everything buckets because I don't want to be stuck on a system that is either proprietary or, if not, limited to the Mac. This might be crazy but it's something that nags at me.
I also find that most forms of data collection that people do just don't interest me. I have no need of saving every last PDF locally that I ever use in research, when I can easily just get it again from SSRN.
That said, I use one, Evernote. I would prefer just being able to sync text files from my iDisk and create new ones on the iPhone. But I can't. So I just use it as a means to sync a handful of plain text documents and those few documents I need to view on my phone.
David Ramos
· 10 months ago
I don't know that VoodooPad is an "everything bucket." Certainly it doesn't provide the same affordances as the applications that Alex Payne names. VoodooPad's basis is hypertext, not search, filling, or tagging.
Joaquim Ramos de Carvalho
· 10 months ago
As a long time VoodooPad user I completely agree with you. My main VoodooPad doc contains every note I took in every meeting in the last 4 years, every log of any complex administrative activity in my machines, every relevant reading notes of every book I read, my personal musings when I am in the mood for self-reflection, my lecture notes, train schedules, notes on where to find a power plug in airports all over europe, many drafts of ideas and an assorted collection of "print to voodoo" embedded pdfs with all sorts of interesting information. All this in instantly searchable, cross linked automatically and, recently, uploaded to my mobile.me account where I can reach it through my iPhone.
I'm late to this discussion... but aren't you and Alex talking about different things?
Alex never mentions VoodooPad in his article, and if you are creating links between VoodooPad pages then aren't you using it as more than just an everything bucket? Creating links between documents sounds like what Alex was describing when he said, "Once data is normalized and structured, finding correlations is faster and easier."
I actually agree with Alex and have gone back to the filesystem instead of everything buckets for organizing lecture material for classes -- but I still use VoodooPad for writing notes. VoodooPad lets me build an extensive cross-indexed wiki of all that I've learned across terms. There's nothing "everything bucket" about this. In fact, VoodooPad is a document-based application, so it even lets me have a variety of documents with completely different contexts.
buckethole
· 9 months ago
Devonthink, EagleFiler, Yojimbo, shovebox, and finally Together....going crazy...back to finder...maybe throw in Vodoopad ? how about tagging? use Punkea ? not future proof . Here we go again ...
chat sohbet
· 9 months ago
I don't know that VoodooPad is an "everything bucket." Certainly it doesn't provide the same affordances as the applications that Alex Payne names. VoodooPad's basis is hypertext, not search, filling, or tagging.
All Comments
http://c-command.com/eaglefiler/
One of the core philosophies of that software is to use the file system as a the backing database for the "everything" ... so a lot of Alex's arguments about database corruption, etc, go out the window.
His arguments seem to condense down to two points: some data management apps demand format lock-in, and if you try hard enough, you can invent your own solution for just about anything. The former is not true of all apps, as EagleFiler testifies, and the latter is technically true, but usually a complete waste of time and energy.
I too am an Everything Bucket person, and Yojimbo works pretty flawlessly for me on three machines (Home, Office and PowerBook). However, its database, and the (slim?) risk of corruption has always concerned me – particularly as my "bucket" grows.
I'd not seen EagleFiler since the GUI overhaul (yes, I am that shallow), and I like what it promises, but Sync is the number one prerequisite for this kind of app to work for me.
BenR: Syncing is certainly something I'm considering for a future version. I don't think it's a "Bad Idea," but it is something that has to be done with care, both for data integrity and to not add too much overhead to the application.
And agreed, Alex's comments along the lines of "your computer wants it that way, why can't you comply?" rang as condescending to me as well.
If the workflow is unbearable to the user, then it is worth spending money on third-party applications to overcome the limitations or annoyances.
Some people use TextEdit and Finder for all their organization, some people use EagleFiler and OmniFocus.
If spending $100 improves your quality of life, or quality of work, then it’s money well spent.
To each his own.
I agree with Alex that these buckets are little more than proprietary filesystems, but unlike real filesystems, they aren't rigorously engineered for speed and reliability. They're also closed, in the sense that other applications on your computer aren't aware of their structure and can't efficiently work with the data therein. Like Alex said, you have to use its built-in text editor, built-in to-do lists, etc, which are almost always inferior to other applications running on your computer.
Spotlight allows one to put comments on files. This is a good place for tags, groups, connections, etc. Also, if I see something I'm interested in on the web, I can highlight the text, or the image, or the URL, or _, and drag it straight to my Desktop. This is what personal computers are for. Maybe there are a few things the Finder could learn from VoodooPad or Yojimbo, but overall I feel their pros don't outweigh their cons.
Do you want a native filesystem and a dozen or so specialized client apps & scripts to maintain? Or do you want a nice monolithic app that does most of what you need? Easy choice for me.
But the one application that has aided me the most is Voodoo Pad. It is the ultimate notebook and I recommend it highly. It is fast and nimble and very good at doing its one purpose exceedingly well.
and the filesystems is engineered for years to be efficient, and you can comment and relate documents by spotllght. He doesn't tell you to go back to thousands of folders and weird naming scheme.
The point is : use a good word processor, a good number application, a good adress book, let the computers index them natively.
(since spotlight, I totally stopped to create myriad of tiny hierarchical folders, I have just broad categorisations)
DevonThink is great, but it will work better if I put all of my "Project X" things in one database and all of my "Project Y" things in another.
Yojimbo is great for storing snippets of information, but stuff enough PDFs in there and kiss syncing goodbye.
Spotlight is great, but I find it works a lot faster if I have put some of my stuff into specific folders that I can then search in, and only if I fail to find it then do I make a broader search.
And of course, Spotlight fails to do a whole lot of pattern matching that would make it more powerful.
I wouldn't throw everything into any bucket.
Nor do I want everything just laying around without any organization whatsoever.
Assuming that Alex has some folders inside his Home directory, he agrees. It's just to what extent.
I'd posit that NLS merely had too steep a learning curve -- people still spend 6 months learning to use your product as long as there are useful milestones where you get value all along that curve. (and as long as a competitor can't provide 80% of the value, with a shallower learning curve, as most users will only ever use a fraction of the power of your product)
I'm a text-heavy data-saver, and VoodooPad works great for me. Since I use it mostly as a work journal, I can (a) find past related entries with an instant search -- the text is the tags -- and (b) create an instant hyperlink to any such reference just by typing the date, since I create a new page per day with the date in the title (e.g., 090210).
Seriously, I'm a huge fan of taxonomy for organizing data -- which is what Alex is essentially proposing as the One True Way of being organized. But, the "everything buckets" I'm familiar with don't preclude taxonomy and structure; they just don't *require* it. That means I throw something into Evernote when all I know about it is "this is something I don't want to forget". I can always apply the structure later. Simple filesystem-based organization isn't as useful.
Besides, Alex claims that every feature of my bucket can be easily duplicated with a filesystem. Clearly, Alex has no need to port his data seamlessly between information domains, like my Windows PC at work and my Mac at home. Why would I set up the complex system (and put up with the overhead) of a remote filesystem over the Internet when Evernote works just fine?
I also find that most forms of data collection that people do just don't interest me. I have no need of saving every last PDF locally that I ever use in research, when I can easily just get it again from SSRN.
That said, I use one, Evernote. I would prefer just being able to sync text files from my iDisk and create new ones on the iPhone. But I can't. So I just use it as a means to sync a handful of plain text documents and those few documents I need to view on my phone.
I still use a pretty organized and structured filesystem strategy managed by Ready Set Go (http://homepage.mac.com/toddvasquez/Ready-Set-Do!/) but they serve different purposes.
Alex never mentions VoodooPad in his article, and if you are creating links between VoodooPad pages then aren't you using it as more than just an everything bucket? Creating links between documents sounds like what Alex was describing when he said, "Once data is normalized and structured, finding correlations is faster and easier."
I actually agree with Alex and have gone back to the filesystem instead of everything buckets for organizing lecture material for classes -- but I still use VoodooPad for writing notes. VoodooPad lets me build an extensive cross-indexed wiki of all that I've learned across terms. There's nothing "everything bucket" about this. In fact, VoodooPad is a document-based application, so it even lets me have a variety of documents with completely different contexts.