I was chatting away with my friend Otto today about photography. Recently I decided to get an SLR camera and relied heavily on Otto’s advice on what to get. (I am now the proud owner of a Canon 30D. With a 17-85 f/4-5.6 EF-S IS USM Autofocus Lens. And a 50mm f/1.8 lens. And a cut-up credit card.) Before I bought the camera I asked him how he learned to be such an amazing photographer (seriously, check out his site) and he said: “I took about 100,000 pictures.”

Well, okay then. I guess I have this 4g media card just burning a hole in my camera.

Today I showed him a pic I took of Simon —

— and said I knew it was too dark, but I didn’t know how to make it lighter than it was using the camera settings. Otto immediately explained to me how I could have changed various speeds and stops to change it. Then he added: “Save all that, check back in two months, see if it makes sense.”

“Yup,” I said. “I have a file in Circus Ponies Notebook called Diane’s Book of Knowledge.”

I use Notebook for two main reasons: 1) to keep a notebook about whichever project I’m working on right then, for the outline, for character info, etc., and 2)to keep a notebook about various facts and factoids I run across and may want to look at it again, such as “how to clean cast-iron” or “how to change * (asterisk) into italics in MS Word.”

“Oh,” said Otto. “I use Yojimbo for the same purpose.”

“You use leaderless samurai? Wait, no, that’s ronin.”

“You were close, though.”

So I immediately went to check out Yojimbo and holy crap if it isn’t one of the best things since sliced bread. A place to store PDF receipts! Various articles I download into my Articles folder and then never look at again because I have no idea what’s in there! Various URLs that interest me and then I never look at again because I’ve bookmarked them and then have no idea what they were! Tagging items on the fly (meaning I don’t have to come up with a set of one-size-fits-all tags)! Watch the Yojimbo Quick Start movie — that will tell you all you need to know.

(Otto also uses Yojimbo for storing passwords and serial numbers, which I am not planning to do, because I use the excellent Password Wallet, which has the advantages of a)syncing to my Palm, so I can carry that info around with me and b)being written by a friend of Darin’s. I keep 350+ passwords/serial numbers/etc. in Password Wallet and haven’t had a problem yet. Highly recommended!)

Within a few seconds of playing with Yojimbo and realizing I could definitely use it in addition to Circus Ponies Notebook, of course I bought it. Apparently my credit card wasn’t cut up enough. Hopefully I’ve fixed that now.

“How come every time I talk to you it costs me money?” I asked him.

“Hey, one of our conversations led to WordPress, that’s free.”

“Yes, but I’d need to blog more often for that to be helpful,” I said.

Undoubtedly I’m going to spend the rest of the afternoon copying articles I’ve downloaded into Yojimbo and tagging them, so maybe they’d actually be useful now.

I have no idea if products like Circus Ponies Notebook or Yojimbo exist on Windows. I do know that there’s a whole world of elegant, powerful non-Microsoft software for Macintosh that is just wonderful, so the next time someone says, “But there’s no software for Macintosh!” snicker at them. I’ve enjoyed using Jer’s Novel Writer for writing, although I’m leaning more toward Scrivener for future projects. (No, I don’t like Word, why do you ask? In fact, I’ve even downloaded NeoOffice to take care of the more egregious Word duties I have. Word is good for the final step of getting a manuscript ready and that’s about it. It’s slow, it’s hard to navigate, and the non-Universal version does something weird to my machine, making it slow down. Feh.)

I use QuickSilver, primarily for operating iTunes when I’m in other applications. I’ve never quite gotten a handle on the many, many, many features QuickSilver has, but I’m certain it would make coffee too, if I let it.

MacGourmet for recipes. (Only because Rob hasn’t finished his recipe app! Get moving, Rob!)

Otto also uses stuff like Renamer4Mac to manage his gigantic photo collection.

MacZot! has daily specials on all sorts of Macintosh-specific programs, from little utilities to a word processor like Ulysses (which I’ve used, and liked, but wasn’t flexible enough for me).

I am very, very happy with the apps out there for my little Mac. And now I am off to organize my machine just a little bit more.