Friend and fellow Mac addict Claire was so pleased with her iPod Shuffle we asked her to write a review for this blog in the vain hope that she’d finally stop going on about it. 😀

This world is a fickle one. We work hard, play harder, use our disposable incomes to buy disposable goods (who would ever have guessed that cars, TVs and stereos would be classed as disposable?). Life in the fast lane is too slow. Our culture bombards us with ever-moving images: we channel-surf the TV, flicking past the advertisements, walk past billboards that change every 20 seconds – we can’t be trusted to concentrate on anything for too long.

And let’s be honest, concentrating is a chore and committing to something for any period of time is hassle – why stay in a dead end job when you can career-hop? Don’t like the commitment of marriage? Wife swap. Even holidays, the epitome of relaxation, become a whistle-stop tour to prevent us from getting bored.

I have a short attention span. I like to think it’s a by-product of my supreme intelligence, but it’s more likely something to do with the brain cells I’ve killed with wine, vodka and beer. The problem is worse when it comes to music. Listening to an entire album can be so tedious. You find an album, stick it on, start to listen, realise the first song isn’t as good as you remember, skip a track, skip another and before you know it you’ve flicked through an entire album but only actually heard two songs in their entirety. It’s all just so ‘samey’, which is why teenagers the world over spend their time making compilation tapes (or these days, CDs from their MP3s – they don’t know they are born!).

This must surely be one of the reasons why those clever boffins at Apple created the iPod Shuffle, a perfect accessory for modern life. Never again subject yourself to an entire album! Download some music onto it (either choose your own or let iTunes randomly select for you) – the Shuffle holds about 240 tracks, so you’ll have plenty of choice – pop in the earphones, hang it around your neck and turn it on. Don’t like the first track? Skip it. You can guarantee the next track will be completely different. Shuffling seamlessly through the playlist, the Shuffle delivers music to suit even the shortest attention span. Listen to Rock next to Pop next to Indie next to Dance – the only limits are those imposed by your iTunes collection.

The very, very best thing about the Shuffle is that you rediscover tracks that you love but had completely forgotten. It’s all one can do to refrain from screaming ‘Tune!’ as an old favourite comes bouncing through the earphones. The next best thing is its size, it’s so small and light, your average lighter will seem bulky. Sling the Shuffle around your neck and forget about it – you won’t get neck strain from this little beauty. The control wheel is so simple and intuitive you don’t need to take your eyes off the road and it has all the functions one could need – skip, repeat, play/stop and volume control. Marvellous.

Of course, being an Apple product and breathtakingly cool, it wouldn’t be complete without its own range of accessories with which you can pamper it (and yourself). As soon as I first used my Shuffle, I wanted an armband for running/cycling, and not content with that I’m pondering a protective case – must keep my baby safe. The Shuffle is so small and gorgeous it’s like having a little puppy that you simply must buy toys for, except you only have to take the Shuffle out for walks when you want to.

In this commitment-free, disposable world I’ve discovered something I want for keeps, something that positively encourages you to change your mind, something that even the shortest attention span can cope with. The iPod Shuffle – I love it.
– Claire

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!

Article on BBC News:

Nasa is doing it, 14-year-old boys in bedrooms are doing it, couples are doing it, gadget lovers – male and female – are definitely doing it.

It is podcasting – DIY radio in the form of downloadable MP3 audio files.

I tend to think that bloat in applications is often a problem of perception. For example, when Microsoft Word 6 was released on the Mac, the biggest complaint was how bloated it was, not to mention everything else, like being clunky and completely un-Mac-like, needing far too much memory and too slow.

Granted, Word has an awful lot of functionality for a word processor, but the v.X version seemed to solve most of the problems with improved performance and a streamlined interface; it looks remarkably more Mac-like and much better than the Windows version. Memory usage matters less these days for a variety of reasons, and this is A Good Thing because having stuff in memory is faster than getting it from disk. Some people still regard Word as bloatware and if you scratch the surface you can still find some quirks and occasionally too many dialog panels and tabs within dialogs, but I think for what it is and what it does, it’s an acceptably Mac-like experience. The point is it doesn’t feel anywhere near as bloated now, despite actually having more functionality than Word 6.

In Word 6’s case, bloat was a perception of excessive functionality causing slow performance. Excessive functionality can be the cause of performance problems, particularly with startup times, but these things can be worked around, for example, by optimising code and only loading things when you need them, not all at once. Word 6’s biggest problem was its user experience.

Now let’s look at iPhoto. Most people don’t consider this to be bloated and while it’s not always been regarded as the fastest app on the block it’s managed to stay within the threshold of acceptability for most people. It actually does an awful lot for what is supposed to be a digital shoebox – importing, organising into albums, slideshows, printable books, web publishing and some basic but increasingly more useful image editing features amongst other things.

Or take iTunes – a digital jukebox that imports and organises music, converts audio files, burns CDs, streams MP3 radio, syncs with iPods and other MP3 players, “transmits” and shares music over a local network and even integrates with its own online music store. Yet in no way do these apps come across as being bloated. They work intuitively and they’re focussed on the task in hand. In fact, they’re so easy sometimes people find it hard to believe that all you have to do, for example, is click the Burn button and pop a blank CD in your Mac. “Is that it?” they ask. Yep!

With these two iApps in mind, I’d like to narrow my definition of bloat now from excessive functionality causing poor performance to “unnecessary functionality”, which boils down to poor design. This is the one thing I really want to avoid in my apps – tricky when you receive so many feature requests, which sometimes conflict with each other. I want my apps to be as intuitive as possible while still being packed full of useful functionality and without any degradation to performance. I believe that you can have it all, but you need to put a lot of thought into achieving this. Good! That’s the fun of it.

I wanted to mention all this not only because it’s so interesting to me but also before I write about the future of KIT. Keep this in mind when you read that post.

With all this talk about Feeder, I should stress that I’m in no way saying KIT is history, but before I write about its future, let’s take a look at its past for a change.

I’ve always missed the Scrapbook and Note Pad desktop accessories (later apps) that came with Mac OS 9 and earlier. Fast to load, always available – perfect. At the time, they did exactly what I wanted them to do. You could drag and drop (or cut and paste) text, graphics, QuickTime movies, sounds, or anything really to the Scrapbook and it would store it away for you. The Scrapbook app was always available in the stripy Apple menu and when you needed something from it, you could just drag it back out again.

It was the same with Note Pad, which actually did look like a notepad and was so cool in the way you could turn the pages. It was just so handy for jotting down those little bits of text when you don’t want to create a new document, save it and have to find it again later. I never thought Stickies would be an adequate replacement – it’s just not the same. I never saw anything on Windows quite like these two little apps.

When Apple took the decision not to ship either of these apps with Mac OS X, tens of replacement notepad apps appeared. I wrote one of the first of these called Notebook (before Circus Ponies’ Notebook and HogBay came out), which was available for the Public Beta. My version was free, and well received (free things that work usually are!), but it’s hard to write and maintain an app when you’re working more than full time on other things.

The notepad market seems to have stabilised now and there are some great apps out there, although I find none do exactly what I want. By Mac OS X standards, the original apps are nothing special, and Note Pad is recreatable in a hundred or so lines of code, but they have a certain charm, just like the Mac itself. I wanted to recreate that charm and bring the usability up to Mac OS X Panther standards.

Let me make it clear – KIT is not a notepad app, and the name itself (Keep It Together) suggests something more. Indeed, its notetaking features could use more work, but it does aim to fill the collective gap left by those two useful utilities. Think of it as iTunes for your files. A user review by “Cynthia” on VersionTracker sums KIT up better than I have managed to date:

“DRAG – DROP and SEARCH – Imagine being able to throw everything in a drawer and find it by calling it’s name… great.”

Scrapbook and Note Pad had their own database files, which could easily be corrupted. There’s no need for that on Mac OS X, so KIT does with files what they did with text and media. KIT allows you to organise all that stuff into groups and smart groups (like iTunes’ playlists), sort them, color categorise them, and its USP was the integration of Apple’s SearchKit technology to find text in any file, including PDFs, as you type.

Despite its simple exterior, KIT is actually quite complicated underneath, using a plethora of custom views (e.g. the iPhoto-like images with shadows), multithreading (to do indexing and large amounts of file copying) and wouldn’t have been possible without Cocoa’s bindings technology, which is why it will only work on Panther and how it works so fast and so well. It’s not unmanageably complicated however – I’m very proud that I took no shortcuts or easy ways out – it’s some of the best code I’ve ever written. Three days after I finished the coding (but a month or so before I released it – needed to do the website, registration system, help pages, etc) Apple announced Tiger and Spotlight and suddenly KIT didn’t look so useful after all.

However, that’s absolutely not true. In the next KIT instalment, I’ll explain why.