I released Keep It Together 1.2 today. For anyone who doesn’t know, KIT is my other application that’s been a little neglected of late, thanks to Feeder. The product page says it best:

KIT is like a magic scrapbook for everything you want to keep. Text, documents, images, movies, sounds, web pages and bookmarks can all be dragged to KIT for safe keeping, previewed, collected together in different ways and found again in an instant.

This version is so much better than the last one, I’m really pleased with it. The release notes tell the story of how much has changed. I started working on something more or less like this version just over a year ago. Unfortunately (or fortunately for my bank balance) podcasting exploded with its inclusion in iTunes and Feeder started to take over my life. It’s only these last couple of months that I’ve had time to work on anything else.

As a result, a lot of things had been piling up for ages – redesigning the website, rewriting my store and administrative backend in Ruby on Rails (because the last system was done in J2EE and I couldn’t work with that any more and I hatehatehate PHP), getting the dreaded books up to date, doing my tax return, etc. I also had to work out what to do next.

So, now everything is sorted out and has calmed down I can devote my attention to both my applications. Expect KIT to continue to evolve alongside Feeder.

Finally, if you read this blog and like the look of KIT, use the following discount code when you check out to save yourself $5 and get KIT for $19.95:

That code will only last a month, expiring at Midnight, PDT on August 25, 2006.

KIT was featured as a download of the day on LifeHacker.

Drag and drop images, movies and office documents into KIT and create file groups, like per project or topic. One file can live in several groups. KIT indexes files when they are added and offers as-you-type search. Instant preview of PDF, Word, HTML, sound, image and movie files appears within the KIT interface. Overall, KIT sounds like it works the way the file system should.

KIT has received a lot more attention since Bare Bones released Yojimbo, which shares many similarities with KIT. People like Yojimbo, and it’s been, er, entertaining reading comments where people say “if only someone had thought of this before!”.

In some ways this has made me realise that KIT was quite ahead of its time but I have lacked the marketing clout to get it noticed out there. KIT 1.1 was released in 2004 and is due an update, but the whole podcasting revolution has kept me very occupied with Feeder for the last year.

I’ll be working on a new version of KIT after releasing Feeder 1.3 in the very near future.

Both KIT and Feeder get mentioned by Allison Sheridan on Show 18 of NosillaCast. Allison also talks about Feeder’s 1.2.5 update on Show 19.

Feeder often gets podcast exposure, but I think this is KIT’s first mention on a podcast and that’s really cool.

I *almost* met Allison at Podcast Expo, she emailed me just as I was leaving the hotel for the Bay Area. I should probably make a list of the people I meant to meet at the Expo to try again next year (well, if I go again next year – hope so!), it would be quite long. Anyway, Allison does an interesting tech podcast and is great to listen to. Thanks Allison!

There is an article on Wired entitled Tiger Tweaks Could Kill Folders, the main gist being that with Spotlight the 20 year old practice of organizing files into hierarchical folders (which incidentally is another one of those metaphors that doesn’t extend to the real world) could be on the way out. It’s an interesting read and while I don’t for one minute think we’ll see the end of the Finder or nested folders I do wholeheartedly agree that people want to see their files in different ways and find them quickly. In that sense, Spotlight goes a long way to alleviating the pain of organising all your stuff. Steve Jobs mentioned also this point in his WWDC 2005 Keynote.

This was the whole idea I had behind KIT and yet the most popular feature request was that it include hierarchical folders – I had so many I decided to write something much too long, complicated and now somewhat outdated about why it was a bad idea, back in my pre-blogging days.

KIT was modelled as an iTunes for your files; something different where you could find things almost instantly and organize them in ways liberated from the file system. Like Gmail, its motto is to search not sort. Thankfully quite a lot of people got KIT but since many of its selling points were made much less persuasive by Spotlight and Smart Folders in Tiger, I will be addressing this wholeheartedly in the next few months.

In some ways, it is more difficult for me to talk about KIT‘s future because a) I haven’t fully decided on everything yet and b) it lives on the fringes of quite a crowded and competitive market area. Showing all my cards might not be the wisest idea.

One of the problems with KIT at the moment is that it is just too flexible for its own good; you can’t just say it’s a note-taking application, an organising app or some sort of file management utility. My previous post, KIT: The Past, explains the reasons behind this, or the basis of its inspiration at least, but this factor makes KIT more difficult to market.

Before I released KIT I didn’t think it had any direct competitors, but it turns out that DEVONthink is an application that does much the same thing, albeit in a more complicated and less pretty way. Look more closely and these two apps are very different. I’m going to try to address the whole marketing aspect of KIT through refining its features and avoiding unnecessary feature bloat.

Actually, while I think of it, Devon Technologies are obviously aware of KIT. I know this because they stole KIT’s Link icon for DEVONthink – I have the original artwork to prove it’s mine. There’s not much I can do about this and it’s only 32 pixels square, but even so. The icons in my applications, apart from the system-wide generic ones, are original.

Back to the point. This post aims to answer two questions: firstly, what is the future for KIT and secondly what will be the point of KIT on Tiger.

On the first question, there is plenty of room for improvement to the application as it is now in the following areas:

• More information about files.
• Better note-taking abilities.
• More file formats supported for previewing and indexing.
• More advanced searching.
• Improved Smart Groups.
• Interface and usability improvements.

I also hope to deal with the problem of KIT’s groups vs subfolders at some point.

With KIT on Tiger, and Apple’s NDA, it’s obviously even more difficult for me to divulge unless the information is already publicly available. Let’s deal with the problem of Spotlight and Smart Folders in the Finder – the two things that supposedly make KIT less attractive to Tiger users. Yes, I was a little perturbed when I saw these features announced and my unreleased but finished product did just these things to an extent. However, that’s cool because a) it at least means my ideas are so good Apple was thinking the same thing b) this technology is not solely available to Apple but to all developers and c) KIT is written in such a way that it can take advantage of that quite easily.

So eventually, in a Tiger-only version, you will see KIT fully take advantage of Spotlight technologies, searching will be even faster and Smart Groups more efficient and more flexible. There are other technologies in Tiger that will take the QuickTime support and PDF viewing to new levels, amongst many, many other things.

So KIT is not going to die any time in the near future, in fact its journey has only just begun. I have so many great ideas the only difficult part is trying to choose what to implement and when. Long live KIT!