Feeder 4.6

March 4th, 2024 by Steve Harris
Feeder icon

Feeder 4.6 is now available. This version adds support for transcripts in Apple Podcasts, includes support for the recommended and optional tags from the Podcast Standards Project, and it’s now possible to publish to S3-compatible services not provided by Amazon.

Podcast Transcripts

In iOS 17.4 you will now be able to see transcripts in the Apple Podcasts app. While Apple can automatically generate transcripts for your podcasts, it’s also possible to provide transcripts in your feed, which you can do in Feeder 4.6 and later.

Transcripts in Feeder 4.6

To add transcripts to your episode, first show Transcripts by choosing Editor > Transcripts > Show Transcripts from the menu. You will then see a table where you can either enter the URL of transcript files that are already online, or choose files to upload along with your feed.

Podcast Standards Project

The Podcast Standards Project is “The Podcast Standards Project is a grassroots industry coalition dedicated to creating standards and practices that improve the open podcasting ecosystem for both listeners and creators.”

While Feeder has always supported the tags required for this project, there are additional recommended and optional tags that are now supported in Feeder 4.6, which includes a GUID, whether or not a feed is locked from being imported by podcast directories, funding and text entries. These can be accessed under the “Podcast Index” heading in the Feed view.

Using S3-Compatible Services

Feeder can now publish to S3-compatible services such Cloudflare R2. To do this, click the Options button next to the Protocol pop-up (when it’s set to Amazon S3) and enter a Custom Endpoint. 

Pricing & Availability

Feeder 4.6 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 its final 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 2.4

February 1st, 2024 by Steve Harris

Keep It 2.4 is now available for Mac, iPad and iPhone. This version improves the display of notes and editable text items on Mac and iPad, importing and attaching photos and videos, inserting links into Markdown files, removing empty lists, and adds the ability to export bookmarks.

Keep It 2.4 for Mac

Photos and Videos

On Macs running macOS 13 or later, and on iPad and iPhone, it’s now possible to attach multiple photos and videos from your Photos library to notes and rich text files. On macOS 13 and later, add standalone photos or videos from your Photos library.

Constrain Width in Full Screen on iPad

On iPad, the width of notes, rich text and Markdown files (both editor and preview) can be constrained when the library split view or a separate editing window are made full screen. This option is on by default, but can be disabled for each file type if the old behaviour is preferred. Plain text files can also constrain their width in full screen, but this is off by default.

Markdown Links and Images

When inserting links to items in Markdown files, there is now an option to link to the item’s file (as a relative path) instead of inserting a Keep It-specific item link. It’s now also possible to choose a Keep It item when inserting a link to an image — in that case, the link will always be a relative path to the image file.

Lists

Confirmation will no longer be requested before moving empty folders to Deleted Items, or when removing empty bundles, labels or saved searches, but confirmation will always be shown for shared folders. The icon for the Recents list is now green.

And More…

The last-used settings will now be remembered when saving web links. On Mac, the format bars for notes, rich text and Markdown documents is now centred in editing windows. On Mac and iPad, see Quick Look preview for multiple selected items in the list. Set display margins for plain text files. Export a bookmarks HTML file of your web links, preserving the folder structure and any tags.

See the release notes for a full list of changes:

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 $23.99/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.

Keep It 2.3

September 26th, 2023 by Steve Harris
Keep It Icon

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.

Keep It 2.3 library window

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:

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.

Moving to Keep It from Evernote (2023 Edition)

July 11th, 2023 by Steve Harris

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.

Feeder 4.5

May 11th, 2023 by Steve Harris
Feeder icon

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 its final 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.