Clever tools keep track of details

Amnesia is a natural state; memory is a construct. Two new software programs introduced at last month's Macworld Expo attempt to fight nature in our favor by helping us to remember people, places and passwords.

Bare Bones' Yojimbo — reference to a Japanese samurai freelance bodyguard — stores the detritus of one's daily digital life in a searchable form (www.barebones.com). The program can import and index the contents of text files, PDFs, Word documents and other similar documents.

While Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) already offers indexing of many document types, Yojimbo searches just its own imported data store — making it faster — while offering a view of resulting matches within the program. (Details of Yojimbo-stored items — not their full text — are indexed via Spotlight, however.)

Yojimbo finally makes storing URLs useful again by freeing them from the tyranny of typically poor tools for adding, modifying and sorting bookmarks within Web browsers. You can search on bookmarks by the name you assign them or part of their URL, which is often an irritating task in a Web browser.

Even better, Yojimbo can create or store a snapshot of any page you can view in a browser. Copy a URL and press function key F8 — a changeable shortcut for invoking Yojimbo at any time. Yojimbo displays a dialog box without switching your application. Choose Web Archive, click Create and Yojimbo absorbs it.

The archive, prepared in the same format used by Apple's Safari browser, is stored within Yojimbo's data store. Password-protected sites visited with Safari can have pages retrieved from Yojimbo, too.

I use Firefox and turned to a welcome alternative when confronted with this problem: printing to PDF, which works within any program with a print option. Select Print and then choose Save PDF in Yojimbo from the PDF menu at lower left.

Yojimbo also handles passwords and serial numbers, the bane of remembrance and recall. Any item within Yojimbo can be encrypted with a widely used and approved-of strong method. Like all Bare Bones products, Yojimbo is clever. Copy a serial number from e-mail and invoke Yojimbo and it's likely to recognize the pattern and prefill a serial number entry.

If you're a .Mac subscriber, Yojimbo can synchronize its contents across up to five computers. It synchronizes additions, changes and deletions — meaning that if you remove an item on one computer, it will be removed from all others. (Requirements: Mac OS X 10.4.3. Compatibility: Universal binary for PowerPC/Intel. Price: $39, single user; $69, five users in a household; $29, educational license, no .Mac sync.)

MemoryMiner picks up with images where Yojimbo leaves off with text (www.memoryminer.com). The program copes with identifying people, places and times in photographs.

This is clearly a cross-generational problem. My father has hundreds of photographs taken by his mother and other family members. His parents' generation is now entirely gone, and he and his cousins and my aunt have used their collective knowledge to identify relatives from one to four generations before them.

But they can't remember or never knew everyone, such as the two separate acquaintances of my grandparents that they assured me were both nicknamed "Herring."

MemoryMiner provides a way to incorporate that knowledge as a layer on top of photographs. Launch the program, and you'll see it's divided into Photos, People and Places. A timeline at the bottom adds a date range.

When you import photographs — the program copies information from the photograph but not the image itself — you can start to work. Double-click a photograph and you can draw a resizable rectangle around each subject.

The program prompts you for each name after a rectangle is drawn, providing you with an interface to your Address Book for fast searches or to create new entries. (One macabre detail: deceased relatives' names appear in your Address Book once added via MemoryMiner.)

Place allows you to provide a specific location from your Address Book, or in an entry defined loosely, by address, or even by latitude and longitude. A zoomable world map can show the specific locations of photographs, too.

With people defined and identified in photographs that have dates and places specified, you suddenly have a rich world through which to navigate across time and space.

MemoryMiner's interface is definitely numbered correctly: like other 1.0 programs, it hasn't figured out precisely how people will interact with the rich features. It's unique enough to recommend now, but I expect dramatic improvements in interface and visualization of relationships. (Requirements: Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later. Compatibility: Universal binary. Pricing: $60; $15 discount until Feb. 14.)

The poetic justice of using programs like Yojimbo and MemoryMiner could come if the programs were discontinued with your valuable knowledge locked inside, as many contact and calendar users have experienced over the years.

The designers of both programs remember their George Santayana and allow easy export of contents and annotations. Now that's a good case of remembering the past to avoid repeating it.

Glenn Fleishman writes the Practical Mac column for Personal Technology and about technology in general for The Seattle Times and other publications. Send questions to gfleishman@seattletimes.com. More columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists