The long-awaited, somewhat-doubted update to Yojimbo. It’s $20 to upgrade, unless you bought version 1.5 in the past 9 months.

Yojimbo 2.0 comes with a polished UI, a new icon, and a slew of well thought-out usability additions related to how info goes in and how it comes out. You can read the release notes here where you’ll see there are no flashy new features, and no mention of an iPhone app.

What the Bare Bones team decided to add, and what they decided to leave out, says a lot. Version 2, as I see it, isn’t trying to win people over from Evernote. (If it was, there would have been an awkward iPhone app.) This is an update for current Yojimbo users, and for people who’s lives don’t hinge on having an info management app that syncs to their iPhone. Your milage may vary, but from where I’m sitting, almost every addition in version 2 meets an actual need in my day-to-day usage of Yojimbo.

The reason it’s not a 1.6 update is because of the fundamental concept behind Yojimbo: minimalism; ease of use; “low friction data collecting”. Bare Bones didn’t lay new tracks, they greased the skids even more. And that is precisely what makes or breaks an app like Yojimbo.

Yojimbo 2.0