Organizing Quotes On A Mac

June 26, 2007 ·

I’ve always enjoyed collecting good quotes. Whenever I hear a good one, I’ll use my phone to send a note to my email inbox to file it away. For a long time, I would just add them to an ever-growing word document. That works fine for safe-keeping, but I wanted a way to better search the quotes. Quoty is a great online way to do it, but a quote book is so much work I just needed an absolute way to back it up. Also, on planes and travel times I like to work on the quote book and I wouldn’t have access to an online service. I wanted to find a good application for it.

I looked at a lot of different applications, but couldn’t find one I liked. I thought maybe I could make one of my own. For a while, I worked with a development team on creating a Mac application for organizing quotes. We got a good start on it, but those fellas had a lot going on and a “just for fun” project never ranks high in a busy schedule. That sent me off searching again.

It was about this time that there was a new version of Yojimbo released. It is basically a digital junk drawer for everything from bookmarks to serial numbers to passwords. I had tried the application out before but it was too “all encompassing” for me. But, with this new version, they included a tagging system and that was enough reason to try it again. I’m glad I did.

I downloaded the application and took out all that I didn’t want to have in it. I just wanted to organize quotes. I think it turned out looking pretty good.

The Things I Like
-The tagging system is great and easy to use. You can have multiple words in a tag. For those of you not using tags, a tag is useful when searching for a theme or subject. For instance, if you had George Washington’s famous quote, “I cannot tell a lie” then you would want to tag it with “honesty.” That way, it would show up when you search for “honesty” even though the word isn’t in the quote. This is better than organizing by subject folders because quotes can be tagged with more than one tag.

- It’s simple to enter new quotes. It can all be done with the keyboard just tabbing between fields.

- It dates the entry of my quotes. I like to see the patterns in my quotes. So often, the quotes line directly with my stage in life. (mission=leadership quotes, college=marriage/motorcycle quotes, Cole=fatherhood quotes, etc)

-The interface is clean (though I did have to make it that way.)

Things I Don’t Like

- You are able to “export” a quote thru the menu bar or just dragging it to your desktop. It is exported as a text file so it’s compatible with everything. However, I wish that the exported files included the Name, Comments and Tags. Right now, it only exports the content.

- I’d like to be able to sync the database to different computers. I was able to find the folder structure and rsync it between my different Macs, but I’d like to do this by using the web by publishing the database to my ftp server. I could do this on my own, but it’d be nice to have it built in (and not have to use a .Mac account.)

For the Other Quote Organizers Out There

To have a more powerful quote book, you should always give as much background on the quote as possible. Where was it spoken or written? Who was the audience? When was it spoken? Was it in response to a question?

When you include details like this, the quote is much more commanding when used in a talk or letter.

Comments

14 Responses to “Organizing Quotes On A Mac”

Missy Caress on June 27th, 2007 8:27 am

Brian, are you using this to organize notes as well? Does this mean you’ve laid to rest your work on an application? Can’t Richard pick up the slack on this just for fun project? Are you so satisfied with Yojimbo that you’re not actively looking for something better?
Brian on June 27th, 2007 8:38 am

Missy, I use this just for my quotes. I don’t think I’ll move forward on the application anytime soon, though I’m completely open to letting nClass Software keep going on it. Right now, I think Yojimbo is good for my quote collection. Plus, since this app was introduced just last year, I think that it still has some good updating in the future.
Connor on November 23rd, 2007 5:53 pm

Brian, just came across this post. Does this app allow you to import quotes (or anything) from a file? If so, what type?

I’d love to add a feature to Quoty to allow for a user to export his/her quotes, say in CSV, XML, or whatever would be best for something like this.
Brian on November 23rd, 2007 8:10 pm

Connor, I’d absolutely love it if Quoty and Yojimbo could be friends. It’d be the ideal way to have a back up. (At least for me.)

Yojimbo does have some importa capability, though I’ve read that it is a bit limited. I did find a post that explains the way to get your del.icio.us bookmarks into xml format and then imported to Yojimbo. Maybe that would show a way?

http://osxhacker.com/2007/05/20/delicious-to-yojimbo/
Herb Bowie on December 26th, 2008 5:28 pm

Have you tried iWisdom? This is a quote application i wrote. It’s written in Java and runs on the Mac or Windows. It imports and exports quotes in a variety of formats, including HTML and XML.
Sarah on March 14th, 2009 7:36 am

Hi, I came across this when I was searching for some way to organize all my quotes – this is great information! However, I’m having a problem with Yojimbo giving me an error message about the “date created” every few seconds! It keeps popping up while I’m typing; it’s basically making the program unusable. Any suggestions?

I really hope to get this figured out; it seems to be the best solution to my quote problem. I also tried iWisdom (mentioned above) but couldn’t figure out how to tag the quotes for easy searching later. The tagging feature of Yojimbo is fabulous! Thanks for the info!
Brian on March 14th, 2009 1:32 pm

For the record, I’m still on the lookout for a better way to organize quotes. Ideally, I’d like to find one that syncs to the iPhone as well.
Samuel on April 11th, 2009 3:58 pm

Wow! I’ve been searching for an app like this – imagine my surprise when I saw “Joseph Smith” in the screenshot.

I guess we Mormons like to collect quotes

Thanks!
David Robarts on June 30th, 2009 11:17 am

Thanks for the review. I’m searching for a way to manage a quote book as well. I’ve recently read many prophetic warnings for our day that I’d like to have more ready access to. One quote that added zeal to my quest:

“The only way to keep our freedom is to work at it. Not some of us. All of us. Not some of the time, but all of the time.”
Speech at Salt Lake Rotary Club—June 8, 1976
(Teachings of Spencer W. Kimball, p. 405)
David Robarts on June 30th, 2009 11:25 am

I see that Yojimbo is published by Bare Bones Software: their Text Wrangler application is my text editor of choice. Maybe I should give it a try.

I recently started using Evernote after seeing the Cocoa Touch app featured in a list of apps that are useful for college students. It seems like it could be adapted for quote book use too.
Brian on June 30th, 2009 1:57 pm

David, I’ve been meaning to update this post. I too am using Evernote for my quotes now. Yojimbo has shown no development in months and months so I moved everything over to Everynote and think it’s great.

The one downside, is the quotes require a internet connection on the iPhone. I do they were stored on the iPhone when synced over.
Soren on September 23rd, 2009 1:32 pm

I wish Quoty or Yojimbo or something would take my quotes and then send me a daily quote from my list!! Is there anything that does that?
Mia on November 2nd, 2009 1:42 pm

Hey Brian, Can you post a link to some more information or a download of the program you’re now using for organizing quotes on a mac? I googled Everynote and could not find what you are talking about! Thanks, Mia
Arif on January 6th, 2010 9:33 pm

Hi Mia,
The link to Evernote is here: http://www.evernote.com/
Cheerio,
Arif