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.

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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.

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 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.

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.

I just added this to the KIT FAQ. A frequent request is to have the ability to drag email messages from Mail or events from iCal to KIT. Unfortunately, this can’t be done, because neither Mail nor iCal put anything on the clipboard for other applications to use.

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.

I wouldn’t normally compare one of my apps to one of its competitors on this blog, but I am frequently asked what differentiates Keep It Together from Yojimbo.

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.