Keep It 2.3 is now available. This version is updated for iOS and iPadOS 17 and macOS 14 Sonoma, makes improvements when adding web page text, allows you to search for prominent features in images, adds Live Text, Visual Look Up and the ability to copy the subject from images on macOS 14 Sonoma, improves working with attachments and links in notes on iPad and iPhone, and previewing Markdown documents.

Adding Web Page Text

Web page text can now be automatically cleaned up when pasted, dropped, or added via the Services menu on Mac. Fonts, colors, and line breaks can all be adjusted, with settings for each. The Clean-Up Formatting feature also uses these settings, so any text that has previously been pasted and would benefit from this can also be cleaned up.

On Mac, where various browsers may copy text differently, there is an additional setting to reduce the font size; text copied from Safari and Microsoft Edge will benefit from leaving this enabled, while text from Chrome and Firefox will not. Keep It checks the default browser when it starts up and sets the default settings accordingly, but these can be overridden.

Images

In Keep It for Mac, standalone images now support Live Text on macOS Ventura and later, and Visual Look Up and the ability to copy a subject on macOS Sonoma. Also, on all versions of macOS, a toolbar is now shown above images in the main window for zooming and rotating.

Keep It can now find images by their prominent features when searching for content. A wide variety of subjects can be identified, including landscape features, buildings, animals, plants, machines, foods, and more. This feature applies to standalone images and attachments on notes, rich text documents, and mail messages in Keep It on all versions of macOS and iOS.

On iPad and iPhone, Keep It uses a new photos picker that allows access to more kinds of photos.

Notes

On iPad and iPhone, it’s now possible to tap and hold on the Aa button above the keyboard to choose from saved note styles without needing to show the format view, and there are improvements when working with bulleted and numbered lists so that behaviour more closely matches how things work on Mac. On iOS and iPadOS 17 specifically, there are improvements for working with attachments and links in both notes and rich text documents.

On Mac, the compact version of the font button in the format bar no longer shows the font face name (for traits such as bold or italic) to prevent the other buttons in the format bar moving when a trait is chosen.

The photos picker will appear half-height when attaching photos to notes and rich text documents on iPhone, and will no longer appear as a popover on iPad. On macOS 13 Ventura and later, you can also use the same photo picker to attach photos and videos to notes and rich text documents.

On Mac, there are improvements when sharing notes to Mail, and when sharing notes to Reminders, Keep It will now exclude any attachments, to ensure the reminder created links back to the corresponding item in Keep It.

And More…

You can now use Quick Open on iPhone and on iPad without a hardware keyboard — tap the action button above the Lists view and choose Quick Open from the menu shown. Also on iPad and iPhone, when you open a link in one Keep It item to show another, a button will be shown to go back to the original item, and you can now see recents when inserting links to items. The default Markdown preview style now matches note styles. Pull to reload web links and Markdown previews on iPad and iPhone. Import folders without using drag and drop on iPad and iPhone. Keep It has also been updated to support changes to Stage Manager on iPadOS 17.

See the release notes for a full list of changes:

• Keep It 2.3 for Mac Release Notes
• Keep It 2.3 for iPad and iPhone Release Notes

Pricing and Availability

Keep It for Mac is available for $59.99 directly from Reinvented Software or the Mac App Store, and both offer a free trial. Existing Keep It 1.x customers can upgrade for $29.99, unless they purchased Keep It 1.x in the 12 months before Keep It 2.0 went on sale, in which case the upgrade is free. Alternatively, Keep It for Mac is also available with yearly or monthly subscriptions at $19.99/year or $2.49/month only from the Mac App Store. Keep It for Mac requires macOS 12.0 or later.

Keep It for iPad and iPhone is available separately from the App Store with a choice of yearly or monthly subscriptions at $11.99/year or $1.49/month. Keep It for iPad and iPhone requires iOS 16.1 or later.

Whenever there is talk of Evernote layoffs, or price rises, or when that Electron rewrite happened for version 10 and Evernote lost things people relied on such as automation, I get an influx of people showing up interested in Keep It.

If you want to import your data from Evernote into Keep It, you’ll need to export an ENEX file first. Find full instructions on the Keep It support page.

As noted there, Keep It will import notes with single attachments as standalone files, web clippings as HTML files, and everything else as a Keep It note, preserving metadata such as tags, and creation and modification dates. 

And yes, Keep It will automatically perform text recognition (OCR) on images and PDFs, whether standalone files or attachments, so that you will still be able to find those.

Make Smart Choices

Whether or not you choose to move to Keep It, I’d urge anyone considering moving from Evernote to another app to make sure that the new app allows you to get your notes out again in a useable format. 

Apps cannot import data from another app if that data that cannot be exported.

For example, Apple’s Notes app can only export individual notes as PDFs or as text via the share sheet, and while you can get further with AppleScript (which Keep It’s Apple Notes importer uses), you can still lose things like clickable links and hashtags.

Exporting from Keep It

Keep It stores everything you put in it as files in standard formats that you can access in the Finder, and can export everything as files and folders, preserving folder hierarchies and tags, by selecting All Items in the sidebar and choosing File > Export All Files from the menu. Or on iOS, tap and hold on All Items and choose Export All Files to export a folder of the files and folders, or a zip file.

When exported, Keep It’s own notes format are converted to rich text files that you can open in TextEdit and many other Mac apps, and view in the iOS Files app. You can also manually convert Keep It notes to rich text files just by renaming them to have a .rtfd extension. Exported notes will lose note-specific features, such as horizontal dividers and interactive checklists, but you’ll see text equivalents instead.

Encrypted files in Keep It are zip files that, provided you know the password (which is stored in your Keychain), can be decrypted in the Finder by opening them with the Archive Utility app, in the Files app on iOS, or with apps such as The Unarchiver, which is free. Keep It always offers to decrypt your encrypted files when you export them from the app.

Keaton Brandt has written an interesting, comprehensive post on Medium, Elegy for the Native Mac App, which also serves as quite a trip down memory lane.  

I’ve been an indie Mac developer in one form or another for well over two decades now, and a lot of that rings true to me. On the minor points, I wasn’t a fan of skeuomorphism, but I think the “fun” part holds (I think that got out of hand and was then overcorrected). Meanwhile, I would expect visionOS to be very much focused on games and entertainment — probably not indie territory by and large — so seeing the likes of Bob Iger in an announcement for that only makes sense. Mind, put those points together, and it seems to me that if anything could bring about a skeuomorphism renaissance, it’s visionOS.

Closer to home, I also agree that these days Apple’s bundled apps are going places previously only third-party devs would dare tread, and that worries me a little. Indeed, apps like Reminders and Notes in particular are very capable now, and if you’re an indie starting out, wanting to do something in that area, those apps will set the baseline, which is a lot. Additional to that, it’s not easy getting things out of those apps (particularly Notes, with all its new features), and so users will remain locked in.

However, the biggest pain point for any developer is making an app cross-platform, potentially on macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android, with perhaps some kind of web version too. It takes a lot of time and effort to make native apps, sometimes an equal amount for each platform, because savings on the things they share tends to get devoured by gnarly platform-specific considerations.

Apple’s answers to that are Apple-only solutions that won’t serve Android or Windows — porting iPad apps with Mac Catalyst, or adopting SwiftUI — and neither are anywhere close to zero effort to deploy across platforms, and nor do they provide a truly first-class experience on Mac right now. These technologies would be perfect for indie developers that only want to target Apple’s platforms, except that I know my existing apps’ users wouldn’t accept either, because the apps would turn out less integrated and therefore less powerful. 

For larger companies who want to target all platforms and don’t have apps that integrate too deeply, a “write once, run everywhere” solution will win out, especially if you can start that way, because your users will never know any different. Contrast that with native apps that have become cross-platform Electron apps, for example, and lose power-user features as a result.

Larger companies won’t feel the backlash anywhere near as much as an indie would, and can probably survive targeting the 90% who don’t care about the niche stuff. Indie apps can often only thrive by also serving the other 10%, especially these days. You also need people to make those apps, so it should be noted that the technologies Electron uses — Javascript, HTML and CSS — are the most common at up to two thirds of everything, while Swift and Objective-C are at around 5% or below.

The Mac App Store fractured the discovery and distribution of Mac apps. Prior to that titles from Apple, indies and corporations sat alongside each other on the Mac OS X Downloads page (archive.org) on apple.com, and as an indie developer that was incredible. 

With the Mac App Store, many amazing apps couldn’t work with the App Sandboxing requirement, or their developers cope with things like 7 – 14 day review times, Apple’s 30% commission, the inability to respond to customer reviews, arbitrarily applied guidelines, or its limited payment models. Apple has addressed many of those shortcomings since, and I think things have got a lot better there, but the Mac App Store remains a shadow of its Mac OS X Downloads predecessor, which is a shame.

Finally, I think the author is correct that indie apps clearly aren’t anywhere near as important to Apple as when the company and Mac were clambering their way back from obscurity. Really, that’s down to the success of iPhone, but also to some extent the decade-long belief by many tech pundits that iPad would ultimately replace the Mac (something Apple always denied), until the Apple silicon Macs came along.

All together this led to the death of most Mac-specific blogs, podcasts, web sites, magazines, etc. Nowadays, such sites either focus on iOS, or tend to specialise in nerd concerns, like Markdown and automation, so you end up with very little, if anything for general Mac users to care about.

I think some things could be better (particularly the Mac App Store, or something like it, showcasing a wider range of apps), but a lot of what’s happened with native apps is just a consequence of where we are with tech today. 

When it comes to actually developing native Mac apps, I think things are better than ever. Whereas iOS and particularly iPadOS have required apps do a lot of work (and rework) to even get close to rivalling their Mac counterparts, macOS has gradually improved and refined what was already a great offering — these days it’s stable, reliable and offers extensive frameworks for just about everything; given the choice, I wouldn’t want to work on anything else.

Feeder 4.5 adds support for some additional tags used by Spotify, Podlove Simple Chapters, chapters in the podcast preview, and includes some other improvements to the item editor, publishing, iCloud sharing, and more.

Spotify Specifics

Podcasts on Spotify require nothing additional over what you provide for Apple Podcasts, but using Spotify’s RSS extension you can optionally specify whether a podcast is more relevant to certain countries, and limit the number of most recent episodes shown in Spotify. 

In addition, if your feed uses the Media RSS extension, you can now restrict a podcast to only appearing in Spotify in certain countries. Find all these under Spotify heading in the Feed view.

Podlove Simple Chapters Extension

Most podcast apps, including Apple Podcasts, get information about chapters from the media file itself. However, Spotify’s mobile app needs chapter information to be included as special tags in the RSS feed using the Podlove Simple Chapters extension. As the name suggests, this extension was originally created to allow the Podlove Web Player to show chapter information, but the same tags may be used by other web players and apps too. 

This extension can be enabled or disabled at any time each feed’s Settings view. When enabled, Feeder will automatically extract chapter information when you add an enclosure file to be uploaded or fetch its attributes, and will include those chapters in the feed, so no duplication of effort is required.

Where a chapter has specific artwork (that does not match the overall episode’s), a corresponding image file can be uploaded when the feed is next published. This option can be disabled, in which case chapters may not show a corresponding image when the episode is played in the Spotify mobile app or any other apps or players that require it — Apple Podcasts will not be affected.

The names for chapter image files will be based on the chapter title, so if episodes regularly contain chapters with the same title and image (e.g. for a recurring segment, or to mention a regular sponsor), a single image file can be shared across multiple chapters and episodes, saving space on the server. Alternatively, Feeder can store the image in a folder named after the enclosure, so that it will always be unique.

These options can be chosen when enabling the extension, or at any time in the feed’s publishing settings.

Chapters in the Podcast Preview

Feeder’s podcast preview will now show a chapters button above the podcast title once you start playing the episode in Feeder’s preview, and chapter images will appear as the episode plays. 

Click the chapters button to see a list of chapters, and click on a chapter to make the player jump to that time and show any chapter-specific artwork. As with the rest of the preview, the chapter list emulates Apple’s Podcasts app.

Pricing & Upgrades

Feeder 4.5 is a free update for all existing Feeder 4 users. Feeder 4 is $49.99 and is available from Reinvented Software and the Mac App Store. Feeder 3 users can upgrade for $24.99 unless you purchased Feeder 3 in the last year, in which case it is a free upgrade. Upgrades are only available from Reinvented Software, not the Mac App Store. See the Feeder support page for more information about upgrading from Feeder 3. To download a 15-day trial and see a full list of changes, see the Feeder downloads page.

Keep It 2.2 is now available. This version adds the ability to merge multiple items into a single note, and to convert various files to notes. Folders, bundles and saved searches can now be duplicated, there are improvements to the Share extension, and more.

Notes

Multiple items can now be merged into a single note. Notes, rich text, HTML, web links, Markdown, mail messages and plain text files will all be shown inline, and other files will included as attachments, with each item separated by a horizontal divider. When merging items, it’s possible to choose the order, the name of the merged note, and whether or not to move the originals to Deleted Items.

Similarly, any individual item can now be converted to a note or an attachment on a note. Previously PDFs and images could be converted to inline attachments on notes, and web archives and web links that can be shown in Reader mode could be converted to notes. Now rich text, plain text, mail messages, and Markdown files can also be converted to notes, and all other files as attachments — with PDFs, images and movies shown inline, and everything else as an icon.

Lists & Items

It’s now possible to duplicate folders, bundles and saved searches on both Mac and iOS, and to duplicate multiple selected items on iOS (which was already possible on Mac).

On iPad and iPhone individual folders or bundles can be exported without using drag and drop, and a new action menu above the items list makes it more convenient to find items, change how the items list is sorted, and choose other options. On iPhone the tag filter can now be resized.

On Mac, Quick File or the menus can now be used to to move an item to a folder where another item with the same name exists — you will be offered to keep both or replace, as when dragging items to folders in the sidebar, matching the behaviour on iOS.

When searching on Mac and iPad, the preview area now shows “No Items Found” to make it clearer that a search is in progress — the number of results is still shown in the title bar on Mac and the status view on iOS, but this makes it clearer that a search is in progress. 

Imports

In the Share extension and Import view on Mac, there is now a search field for filtering destination lists or items, as on iOS, and you can create folders or bundles when adding things via the Share extension or the in-app Import View too.

On Mac it’s now possible to drag files, links and text to Keep It’s title bar to add those things to the current list. It’s also possible for Keep It on Mac to automatically convert Markdown and Word files to Keep It notes when they are imported (or en masse later) to help when moving from other applications that only export those formats. Markdown files will be styled using your current note styles, as when converting individual Markdown files.

And More…

Use the share sheet to start collaboration on macOS Ventura. Movies can be played in Picture in Picture mode on both Mac and iOS. On Mac the number of items can be shown above the list in Compact Mode, and you can click and hold on the history buttons to navigate directly to a particular item. There are also improvements when viewing images and PDFs on Mac, editing Markdown files on iOS, and saving existing web links on both Mac and iOS.

See the release notes for a full list of changes:

• Keep It 2.2 for Mac Release Notes
• Keep It 2.2 for iPad and iPhone Release Notes

Pricing & Availability

Keep It for Mac is available for $59.99 directly from Reinvented Software or the Mac App Store, and both offer a free trial. Existing Keep It 1.x customers can upgrade for $29.99, unless they purchased Keep It 1.x in the 12 months before Keep It 2.0 went on sale, in which case the upgrade is free. Alternatively, Keep It for Mac is also available with yearly or monthly subscriptions at $19.99/year or $2.49/month only from the Mac App Store. Keep It for Mac requires macOS 12.0 or later.

Keep It for iPad and iPhone is available separately from the App Store with a choice of yearly or monthly subscriptions at $11.99/year or $1.49/month. Keep It for iPad and iPhone requires iOS 16.1 or later.