I had the same issue and found Evernote. It now fills the roles you mention (well, I would't put music or photos in it as I use iTunes/Spotify and iPhoto/Flickr for those, but you <i>could</i>). So, perhaps I'll just say what about Evernote makes it awesome for me, and what, in a new thing, could make me switch..<p>I use and need a reasonably flat-form environment with tagging. I don't care for folders, hierarchies, or whatever, because I'm too impatient and have a bad memory for structure. I just want to throw stuff in and have it use tags or similar to figure out my intent. When it's time to get stuff out, I'd rather type in a query than go digging through folders, for instance (the Google vs Dmoz/ODP approach).<p>Separate to tagging, though, I want to also search all content Google style, but with tags and filetypes having extra "weight." So if I search "pdf gasoline receipt", I want PDF files tagged with "receipt" and containing the word "gasoline" to come up higher than, say, the text of this comment (if I archived it.) Evernote doesn't <i>quite</i> get this right, but it's OK.<p>I almost don't care about the layout as I don't want to live in the app. I want to do two things: get info in and get info out. Other than that, I don't want to see anything. So I have it globally hotkeyed and then do one of those two things.<p>A <i>very</i> important matter is that I can create notes easily without getting bitched at constantly that I've "forgotten" to fill out a field or whatever. Evernote gets this right. Once I click "New Note", I can tab through title, tags, and then I'm in content. There I can drag whatever I like, type what I want, and it's indexed. It needs to be as simple, yet flexible, as possible.<p>Lastly, and Evernote gets this <i>very</i> wrong.. I don't want an information manager changing my info! Evernote's rich text editor keeps screwing up my formatting and fonts.. even on "plain text" stuff. I wish they could just let me have a totally plain text view without any of the rich stuff.<p>Oh, and make it sync somewhere - preferably through the file system so I can use Dropbox to sync it across computers myself. In fact, if you did that (and recommended users use Dropbox), then you solve the backup issue too and could use Dropbox's affiliates thing ;-)