Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is publicly available today. Both current releases of Feeder (2.0.5) and Together (2.2.11) are fully compatible. If you are installing Snow Leopard, please ensure you are using these versions, which can be downloaded through the Sparkle automatic update system built into the apps, or from their respective product pages.

You may notice that the Services menu has been cleaned up in Snow Leopard and this affects Together users. You can now choose which items to show and set shortcut keystrokes for the Services menu in System Preferences. Unlike the mess of before, Snow Leopard only shows the services that are relevant to the current selection.

An additional enhancement is that items in the Services menu now appear in contextual menus. This is intended to replace contextual menu plugins across the system, as those will not work with 64-bit applications.

Speaking of which, I plan to make both Feeder and Together 64-bit applications on their next major release (Feeder 2.1 and Together 2.3). Together will be released first and Feeder will follow. Feeder is much more reliant on a number of third-party components than Together, so that transition will take longer.

I plan to take advantage of more Snow Leopard technology in my apps in due course, while retaining Leopard compatibility for a while.

I’ve been using Snow Leopard for a while now and my favorite enhancement has got to be the improved Exposé, especially the way an app is put under the spotlight when dragging to its Dock icon. I think Snow Leopard is my favorite release of Mac OS X since 10.3 Panther. Big headline features are great, but a focus on thoughtful enhancements and improved performance always seems to make me smile.

So, if you’re installing it today, I’d like to wish you a happy Snow Leopard day!

Together 2.2.4 introduces a very small, but potentially quite useful feature addition following a feature request. You can now send a Together item link for the selected item in the list (or the item in the current tab) to another application using the Services menu.

To give a practical example, OmniFocus‘s Clipping feature allows you to set a keystroke that can be used to import the current selection into OmniFocus. For most applications, it achieves this using the Services menu.

As of Together 2.2.4, when an item is selected in Together and OmniFocus’s clipping service is used, whether through the keystroke or Services menu, OmniFocus will create a new task with the Together item link in the tasks’s notes. Clicking the item link will open the original item in a tab in Together.

As I mentioned, this is using Mac OS X’s system services, it’s not an OmniFocus-only tip, so you may be able to find a use for this in other apps, too.

Together 2.2 is available today, bringing improvements to tagging, groups, item categorization, tabs, the Shelf, imports and previews. Here’s a summary of the main changes:

Tagging

Together 2.2 introduces intelligent auto-tagging based on items with similar content. When items are imported or saved, Together will analyse their content and tag them based on other items with the same tag.

Also in 2.2, tags can be organized into bundles, and system tags (which show things such as labels, ratings and groups as though they were tags) are also shown in their own bundles. It’s now possible to show items that have all the selected tags in the tag browser, rather than any of the tags.

The new Change Tags panel replaces the Add Tags panel to add or remove specific tags from multiple items or all items in a group. This is useful as is not possible to edit specific tags in the Info view when multiple items are selected and not all items have the same tags.

Items

Together 2.2 adds a new Web Page group to show all web archives, web pages and PDFs of web pages, whether printed from a browser or web PDFs created by Together.

Items’ file creation and modification dates can be edited in the Info view by clicking on the date.

Tabs for items can now be rearranged and will scroll horizontally when there are too many to be displayed in the main window.

Web PDFs have also been improved so that you can specify the minimum size for a web page when creating a PDF in Together, with default settings in Together’s Previews preferences panel that will be used when PDFs are imported from dragged URLs.

Also, the content for notes and text documents can now be zoomed and the default zoom percentage can be set in Previews preferences.

Groups

Groups and smart groups can now be nested in folders. Items can be added to new or existings groups and moved to folders using the Items menu.

Shelf

Together 2.1 added the ability for the Shelf to show options when importing. This is now improved so that, in the case of single-item imports, you can edit the name of the item being imported.

Also, Together will return to the previous application after the Shelf closes and there is a new “Find in Library” hot key to open the Shelf with the search field selected.

Importing

Together now has better handling of file promises. Sometimes when dragging from other applications, the other application is responsibile for creating the file in Together’s library, but Together would only know when that process started and so would show the new item in the library before the copy had completed. This could cause some confusion for larger files, so now Together will wait until the file has been fully copied to a temporary location.

This change also works around a problem where Mail.app will silently overwrite exported email files with the same subject, as Together now has control over the name of the imported file.

There are plenty of other smaller improvements and tweaks in this version. See the Together release notes page for a full list.

I’m occasionally asked if I can compare Together with its competitors or the approaches of similar applications. For all sorts of reasons, I doubt I’m the right person to ask for an opinion. However, a rummage through this web site’s referral logs revealed some interesting comparisons that have been posted recently:

• Yojimbo vs Together vs Evernote: a review by Rachel Murphy, whose blog includes a number of thoughtful posts on Mac software.
• 8 Web Information Collectors Reviewed by Daniel Jomphe covers DEVONthink Personal, EagleFiler, Journler, Circus Ponies Notebook, Scrivener, SOHO Notes, Together and Yojimbo.
• Solving Mac Information Management: Yojimbo, Journler, Together, VoodooPad, EagleFiler, WikityWidget, Punakea, Leap on NOT a blog
• UX Magazine – Review: Mac Information Managers quickly compares Yojimbo, Soho Notes and Together.

A number of these point out that it’s your needs that count, and that is a crucial point. All apps have their place as they can offer something unique; any app that tries to be all things to all people is going to be a disappointment.

Fortunately you can download and try all these apps for yourself. That said, with so much choice, blog posts like the above, written by real users, can be a great starting point.

Together has always been pretty capable in its support for importing all sorts of things, through the Shelf, Dock icon and system services. Together 2.1 adds three new ways to import links and files.

Automatic File Import

Together can now automatically import files saved in its library folders, meaning you can save files directly to Together’s folders without having to manually import them. This can be enabled by checking “Auto import files added to Library folders” in Import preferences and it’s on by default.

For documents to be imported, you can save them anywhere in Together’s library folders apart from the Support and Trash folders. Together may move the document if it’s in the wrong page (e.g. a text document in the Images folder).

This will probably remove most people’s need for specific watched folders, but that method is still possible and may be useful too.

Import Hot Key

Together 2.1 also adds support for a global import hot key, which can also be set in Together’s Import preferences.

When the hot key is pressed, links or files will be imported according to Together’s Import preferences. This will work with most web browsers, Mail, Microsoft Entourage and NetNewsWire and the Finder.

Bookmarklets

A popular request was for Together to have support for bookmarklets, so web pages can be saved to Together with a single click, so this is now available in 2.1.

You can install the bookmarklets in your browser by clicking the Bookmarklets button in Together’s Import preferences. There are three different bookmarklets to save the current page as a bookmark, web archive or web PDF.