A few of people I know swear by apps like Yojimbo and Bento. I can’t get into them, something about the whole thing makes me nervous. Alex Payne has written a rant against these “everything buckets.”
I’m not sure if I agree with all his points, though. His argument hinges on the notion that people should be smarter about their file systems. In my lifetime of casually observing other people’s computing habits, I think it would be generous to say that one in twenty folks actually organize their files into some kind of hierarchal system.
Most people simply save to desktop. This really sucked for everyone, but it never sucked enough for them to adopt good habits like smart organization. (Windows piss-poor replication of a true spatial file system deserves a little blame, of course.) That is, it sucked up until Apple recognized that it was easier to find information on the Internet than on one’s own computer, and they finally introduced Spotlight. Now some claim that Finder — the interface for organizing files and launching apps — is now obsolete, and they have a point.
I don’t believe that dumping all your files in a “bucket” (the desktop, the Documents folder, whatever) and using Search to find everything is the best way, exactly, but telling people to Just Get Organized is a battle that I’m tired of.
I’m still leery of Everything Buckets; Payne’s notion of the bucket as a redundant file system is interesting. But expecting users to develop good desktop habits is like expecting cats to grow thumbs and open their own Friskies. Technologies like Spotlight and Google Desktop Search (and, yes, Evernote) will get better long before people get better trained.
