Import from Slipbox

[Laine Lee]

I'm trying Yojimbo, but I'm not able to find any conversations here about importing or migrating from Slipbox. The author of Slipbox sent me a version that was 64-bit (64, 65, whatever it takes - yes, that's adapted from Mr. Mom) compatible after that became a requirement, but I haven't seen any evidence of development for it lately, so I'm interested in Yojimbo. Have you ever moved from Slipbox to Yojimbo? Have you ever used Slipbox? Thanks.

[Tom Eggebeen]

I’ve never used Slipbox … but I’ve used Yojimbo for years … I mean YEARS. Ha.

I rely on it constantly … I do much of my preliminary writing on it … and save to it tons of data.

Hope you can find a way to migrate to Yojimbo.

Tom Eggebeen,

Retired Presbyterian Minister

Pasadena, CA

One never knows what pathways will appear until one begins to take the one nearest at hand …

On Apr 6, 2023, at 2:36 PM, Laine Lee <lle...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

I'm trying Yojimbo, but I'm not able to find any conversations here about importing or migrating from Slipbox. The author of Slipbox sent me a version that was 64-bit (64, 65, whatever it takes - yes, that's adapted from Mr. Mom) compatible after that became a requirement, but I haven't seen any evidence of development for it lately, so I'm interested in Yojimbo. Have you ever moved from Slipbox to Yojimbo? Have you ever used Slipbox? Thanks.

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[Patrick Woolsey]

The first thing you'll need to do is determine what type(s) of
data you can export from Slipbox.

Then, on the other side of the equation, here are the types of
data that you can import into Yojimbo:

* bookmarks (in the form of ".webloc" or ".urlloc" files or any URL
dragged from another app, e.g. Safari)

--> are stored as bookmark items in Yojimbo

* images in most standard formats (.gif, .jpg, .png, etc.)

--> are stored as image items in Yojimbo

* PDFs (whether created within Yojimbo or from any other source)

--> are stored as PDF archives in Yojimbo

* plain text files

* rich text files, including Mac styled text, RTF, RTFD, and
many Microsoft Word ("*.doc") files

* text clippings

--> are all stored as notes in Yojimbo

* web archives (created by Safari)

--> are stored as web archives in Yojimbo

Yojimbo does not, however, support storing arbitrary files *or*
any files which require a specific app to open & edit, e.g.
Excel, PowerPoint, or Pages documents, or camera RAW images.

Finally, you can import any eligible files into Yojimbo via drag
& drop to its "Library" collection, or any manual or tag
collection, or the Drop Dock.

I hope this helps get you started!

Regards

Patrick Woolsey
==
Bare Bones Software, Inc. <https://www.barebones.com/>

[Tim Gray]

I’ve never used SlipBox. If you can export or access your content in some meaningful way other than the user interface (AppleScript?) there might be a path forward to a reasonable import into Yojimbo. 

On Thu, Apr 6, 2023, at 5:36 PM, Laine Lee wrote:

I'm trying Yojimbo, but I'm not able to find any conversations here about importing or migrating from Slipbox. The author of Slipbox sent me a version that was 64-bit (64, 65, whatever it takes - yes, that's adapted from Mr. Mom) compatible after that became a requirement, but I haven't seen any evidence of development for it lately, so I'm interested in Yojimbo. Have you ever moved from Slipbox to Yojimbo? Have you ever used Slipbox? Thanks.

[Laine Lee]

Thanks, Tom and Patrick!

Patrick, Slipbox exports to .rtf and .rtfd. Do you know by chance whether a string comprising the last textual line of Slipbox' exported .rtf's and .rtfd's might be used to define categories for the imported items in Yojimbo? Do you know of any scripts for importing which exemplify that sort of parsing for textual content? Here's an example of the category assignment comprising the last line of an exported Slipbox note in .rtf format:

Keywords: Virtualization/Emulation, Utility, Software Info, Plug-in

I'm intrigued by the possibility of keeping category assignments on import to Yojimbo.  I'll be importing nearly 3k exported items that have been collected since I started using Slipbox in 2006. I routinely export all the items, which are collected in a folder of .rtf's and .rtfd's. I've often considered migrating to a system of simply working with the notes in the .rtf and .rtfd format and using TextEdit, Finder, and Spotlight to manage them. Of course, now there's FreeForm, and I recently added the Ninox database app for free from the Mac App Store (I assume it's still available for free). It's good to have choices, I guess, but I'm still thinking it might be worthwhile to let a commercial app such as Yojimbo do the lion's share of heavy lifting.

Thanks again.

[Laine Lee]

Thanks, Tim.

[Patrick Woolsey]

Laine,

Thanks for the info and that's good as Yojimbo can import both
.rtf and .rtfd directly as note items.

Further, though there's no intrinsic way to extract Slipbox
keyword categories from the exported files, I believe
(admittedly without having tackled the job ;-) that one could
accomplish this via AppleScript, i.e. read in the contents of an
RTF file and convert same to plain text, gather the contents of
last line and transform each word to a tag, then tell Yojimbo to
import the original file and apply the transformed tags.

(NB: I expect this to be a rather messy task, depending on your
familiarity with AppleScript, but there is at least a chance if
you're so inclined. :-)

Regards

Patrick Woolsey
==
Bare Bones Software, Inc. <https://www.barebones.com/>

[...older messages elided...]

[Laine Lee]

Thanks again. I saw the line in the welcome item in Yojimbo that mentioned importing items with AppleScript, and I'd like to try it. I didn't find any direct references to AppleScript in the main Yojimbo help, so can you point me toward any AppleScripts for importing into Yojimbo that assign categories in whatever way? I've used AppleScript quite a bit and starting with an example usually helps.

[Ulf Dittmer]

Categories are called "tags" in Yojimbo. I found this script in the depth of my collection which creates a bookmark and adds tags to it (originally probably from someone at BareBones).

tell application "Yojimbo"

set bookmarkName to "My Example Bookmark"

set bookmarkURL to "http://www.example.com/"

set bookmarkComments to "your comments go here"

set newItem to make new bookmark item with properties {name:bookmarkName, location:bookmarkURL, comments:bookmarkComments}

add tags {"a tag", "another tag", "important tag"} to newItem

end tell

Also check out https://github.com/anoved/Yojimbo-Scripts, which has a couple of scripts that deal with tags.

As regards importing stuff in general, check out https://www.macscripter.net/t/how-to-read-csv-file-and-parse-into-applescript-list/69392 which shows hot to process CSV files.

[Laine Lee]

OK, thanks. I think that should get me started.

[Laine Lee]

OK, I made a Droplet application from the following source, in case it helps anyone else. It accepts .rtf and/or .rtfd. It uses TextEdit.

I had some help from Alastor933 at Macscripter. 

Being a little unused to posting AppleScript source here in Groups, I may have to edit some after the first try. Thanks again for your help.

########

on open the_items

my Yojimbo_import(the_items)

tell application "TextEdit" to quit

end open

on Yojimbo_import(the_items)

repeat with the_item in the_items

set the_item to the_item as alias

set tag_Extracts to my extract_Tags(the_item)

tell application "Yojimbo"

set newItem to import the_item

add tags tag_Extracts to newItem

end tell

end repeat

end Yojimbo_import

on run

set the_items to ((choose file with multiple selections allowed) as list)

Yojimbo_import(the_items)

end run

on extract_Tags(theSourceFile)

tell application "TextEdit"

open theSourceFile # REQUIRED

tell document 1 -- this is always the file it just opened

set rawKeys to paragraph -1

close

end tell

end tell

set {TIDs, AppleScript's text item delimiters} to {AppleScript's text item delimiters, ": "}

set listKeys to text item 2 of rawKeys -- drops "Keywords"

set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ", "

set listKeys to text items of listKeys

set AppleScript's text item delimiters to TIDs

return listKeys

end extract_Tags

########

L. Lee