Organizing Quotes On A Mac

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.