Together costs $39, KIT was $24.95 and an upgrade to Together is $14.95, roughly the difference in price. Anyone who purchased KIT in the three months preceding Together’s release (Aug 15 onwards) is entitled to a free upgrade. To get that, go to purchase Together as normal, choose an Upgrade license and enter your KIT registration code. There’s a form built into the store to email the code to you if you’ve mislaid it. You will then be told if you qualify for a free upgrade.

As Together is a paid upgrade and Leopard-only, KIT users won’t receive the usual Sparkle update notification (incidentally, Sparkle can’t handle name changes). Instead I reworked my pre-Sparkle software update mechanism to show an alert that a major new version is available (but you have to download this manually), a list of new features and the above pricing details. On this alert there is a “Skip Version” button that prevents the alert from being shown again.

Finally, I realise existing KIT users will want to try Together to see if it’s worth upgrading. Together’s library format is completely incompatible with KIT’s, and as it works with real files on disk, things could get seriously out of step if the two apps were used in parallel. So, on first run Together will offer to import your KIT library and will make copies of all the files. Once the import is completed you are given the opportunity to move your old KIT library to the Trash. If you want to keep using KIT or have any problems with the import process, you shouldn’t do that. You can also choose to defer importing until later.

Also, there is a chance to win one of two free copies for people who post comments on the MacUpdate Promo site.

The offer only runs for 24 hours, so if you’re interested go to the MacUpdate Promo site to buy.

Update: The offer is now closed.

This is one of those tools that has a TON of cool features and capabilities that you can love even if you don’t use all of it.

I didn’t know in advance, but the review was actually done by Allison Sheridan of the NosillaCast – a “technology geek podcast with an EVER so slight Macintosh bias”. Allison is actually a registered user of both my products, I know her in particular as an enthusiastic Feeder user.

NosillaCast stands out by being quite varied in nature with lots of original content ideas, so it’s always interesting. Allison is also quite brave at doing her own experiments with technology and her friendly style makes the podcast easy listening. Check it out.

Tags and Ratings

You 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.

You 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.

Finally, 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.

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.

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.

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.

Jitesh 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.

If you use Entourage, you can drag emails and events to KIT because it does put some usable data on the dragging clipboard. You can drag the text of an email from Mail, but this isn’t quite as convenient.

Superficially the two apps appear to be very similar: both allow you to store and preview documents, web archives and bookmarks, create notes, etc; both KIT’s groups and Yojimbo’s collections work more like iTunes playlists than regular folders, where a file can exist in more than one group at a time and there is no hierarchy.

However, Yojimbo has special formats for things like passwords and serial numbers while KIT will work with any kind of file including images, movies and even formats it can’t preview. KIT keeps all the originals as files on disk (or uses aliases to link to existing files), Yojimbo keeps everything in a database. Some people prefer one approach to the other, so that’s cool.

In a nutshell, KIT is more about files, whereas Yojimbo is more about data. At times, the feature sets of the two collide, but that could apply to any number of applications in this genre. I’m actually very happy about Yojimbo because when I released KIT back in 2004 it offered a fresh approach that not everyone seemed to understand. That changed after the release of Yojimbo and interest in KIT renewed, so it’s certainly done me some favours there.

In the future you can expect to see KIT further differentiate itself for Yojimbo. I have some very exciting plans for the app, some of which will be seen sooner rather than later.