Earlier in the year I posted a tip for password protecting your feed. At the time there was a problem with iTunes where it would require the user name and password to be entered every time you tried to update a podcast, unless these were placed in the feed’s URL like so:

http://user:password@www.example.com/feed.xml

Thankfully, the problem has been fixed in iTunes 7.0 and this workaround is no longer required. I have updated the original post on this blog and the Feeder Tips feed to reflect this.

Thanks to Don McAllister of ScreenCastsOnline for letting me know.

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.