Archive for the 'Keep It Together' Tag

Keep It Together 1.3

Monday, February 12th, 2007

Keep It Together 1.3 is released today and includes a number of new features and improvements. Here are the highlights:

Tags and Ratings

KIT 1.3 TagsYou can now add searchable tags to items along with star ratings. These are both really quick and easy ways to help sift through your data.

You can add tags to items in the Info drawer and search for them in the main window. Ratings can be applied both in the Info drawer and items list.

And of course, both tags and ratings can be used in Smart Groups too.

PDF Service, Dragging Links, Hot Key

There are now three new ways KIT can work more conveniently with other applications.

KIT 1.3 Save to PDFYou can now print PDFs to KIT from within any application. Just choose “Save PDF to KIT” from the PDF menu in the standard print sheet.

A much requested feature was the ability to toggle between creating a web archive or a bookmark when dragging a link, overriding the default preference. This can now be achieved by holding on the Option key to create a web archive or the Control key to create a bookmark when dragging a link.

For convenience, KIT can now be brought to the front using a hot key, which can be set in its General preferences.

User Experience

There are small changes to the user interface. The status bar (“1 of 10 items selected”) is gone, because I saw it as a waste of space. Instead, this information is shown in the main window’s title bar. There is also an option to show the item counts for each group in the View Options panel.

Also added to the View Options panel is a setting “Size Columns to Fit”. Disabling this prevents the item list columns from resizing to fit the window. In KIT 1.2, when columns were sized so that you could scroll horizontally, those settings would be lost when you relaunched.

KIT Growl NotificationFinally, KIT now supports Growl, so will post notifications when importing and exporting files.

There are many more changes, all of which are listed in the release notes.

The Future

I received a lot of feedback from KIT 1.2 and I’ve tried to add the most popular feature requests in this release. There is a lot more I want to do to KIT, particularly improvements with Spotlight integration, searching and a whole host of other features.

Update: Oops, there was a small problem in KIT 1.3 where it may not launch properly. Another version is uploaded now that should fix this – click to download. It only happens if you’re missing the “PDF Services” folder in your Library folder.

MacSanta

Tuesday, December 19th, 2006

MacSanta IconA group of independent Mac software developers have got together to create MacSanta, where you can save 20% on lots of great Mac software from now through to December 25th.

On the MacSanta site, you can find special deals from Rogue Amoeba, Bare Bones, C-Command, Flying Meat, Potion Factory, Red Sweater and ThinkMac, amongst many others, with even more to be added through the week.

And of course, this also includes both Feeder and KIT.

All you have to do to save 20% on the regular price is enter MACSANTA as a discount code when you check out from any of the companies’ stores.

KIT and Familiarity on Mac360

Saturday, December 2nd, 2006

Jack D. Miller at Mac360 has written a quick review of KIT, and has picked up on a few things that are very deliberate: familiarity.

It’s your Keep It Together application that simply holds a little of everything– documents, photos, movies, sounds, web pages, even text– all in the library (just like iTunes or iPhoto).

Search is quick and familiar. If you’ve used iPhoto or iTunes you can get into KIT very fast– as in instantly. The same goes for Yojimbo, Mori, and countless other Mac applications adopting the new look.

[…]

Is it a new look? Or, does it trace a history back beyond the early iTunes versions? To be honest, I don’t know. It all just feels so familiar.

I originally designed KIT in 2004 around the idea of being an “iTunes for the rest of your files”. I loved the way I could just drag stuff to iTunes and not have to organize it, mix different tracks from different albums in playlists and find something just by typing. This was before Tiger, with Spotlight and Smart Folders in the Finder, etc.

The three-paned interface had definitely been around a while before iTunes; what I think iTunes really added was the concept of a “Library” that shows everything coupled with very quick and simple searching, a move away from hierarchical folders in the interface and later the addition of Smart Groups/Playlists/Albums, which cleverly and automatically sort through things for you.

It’s such a straightforward and convenient approach, it’s taken for granted these days and that’s good. This consistency and simplicity means the basics of an app work exactly as people expect, which feels good and leaves more time for exploring everything else.

KIT 1.2.4, PithHelmet and OmniWeb’s Site Preferences

Friday, September 15th, 2006

Some KIT users are surprised that KIT doesn’t respect their PithHelmet settings or have asked for support for PithHelmet when creating web archives. PithHelmet is a plugin that can block ads, Flash, etc on web pages – however, PithHelmet only works with Safari. OmniWeb includes similar functionality where you can set preferences for individual sites and KIT won’t respect them either.

When KIT creates a web archive, it downloads the files itself. While it could have preferences for blocking things like Flash, Java and animated images, replicating the functionality of PithHelmet in KIT would be an ordeal. One alternative is to create the web archive in Safari or OmniWeb and add that to KIT.

Another alternative, introduced with KIT 1.2.4, is to drag or copy the text from the web page to KIT. Note that this won’t produce perfect results for whole pages as some page elements (usually background graphics) are not selectable in the first place, however if you only actually want to keep a particular portion of the web page and want to know its original URL, this can be an ideal solution.

KIT 1.2.3 & Backup QuickPick Now Available

Saturday, September 9th, 2006

KIT 1.2.3 was released yesterday and deals with most outstanding issues since MacZOT a week ago; I have a few less-urgent changes lined up for a 1.2.4 release and plenty of feature requests for the future.

QuickPickJitesh Vallabh has made a KIT QuickPick for Apple’s Backup app, which I’ve put into an installer that you can download from the KIT features and download pages, or here: KITBackupQuickPick.dmg (15k)

This QuickPick will backup your KIT preferences and library unless a custom folder location has been chosen.