Keep It Together!

Review By: Allison Sheridan of the NosillaCast Podcast hosted at podfeet.com.

I was delighted to accept your request to review Keep it Together, otherwise known as KIT from reinventedsoftware.com because it’s actually a tool I use really often. Reinvented Software is also the home of the outstanding Podcast creation tool for the Mac called Feeder, which is what I use to do all of my Podcasts. The developer, Steve Harris, is incredibly responsive to requests and assistance, and in fact ages ago I wrote to Steve about how much I liked KIT and he said he wasn’t really developing it because it ended up on the back burner because of all his work on Feeder. He said that renewed interest (from people like me) got him going again, and he’s made tons of advances since then.

Ok, after all that teasing, what does KIT actually do? As the website says, 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, tagged, previewed, collected together in different ways and found instantly. Think of it as a great junk drawer, you know you want to keep all this info but it’s all different kinds of stuff, so this is one place where you can keep it all together.

KIT has a very clean Mac-like interface. It has a pane down the left side that is pre-populated with certain categories, like Library, last import (kind of like iPhoto), Notes, documents, Images, Sounds, Movies and Bookmarks. From there you can add groups (which look like folders) with a simple click of the plus sign at the bottom. One of the most powerful features of KIT is that you can put the same thing in multiple places. Let’s say you have a bookmark that you want to remember, but it’s important to your PhD thesis – you could put it in a folder called PhD, and also have it in the Bookmarks folder. It makes it so much easier to find, because whichever one you think you might have put it in, it will be there for you.

The body of KIT works kind of like Apple Mail – with those groups and categories down the left side, you click on one of them, and the top half populates with the items inside it, and the bottom half is sort of like a preview pane. there’s an info drawer that slides out of the right hand side showing a lot of info about the selected item – like for images it tells you the file name, format of the image, creation date, size and where the actual image is on your disk. You can add comments and tags here, which can be used for making smart groups. I’m a big fan of the smart groups concept, it makes it so much easier to find stuff if i can just define a search criteria and the stuff that matches it is always there. Speaking of search, KIT uses Spotlight to search.

KIT allows you to customize your toolbar, but the good stuff is pretty much already in the toolbar as it’s shipped to you. This is one of those tools that has a TON of cool features and capabilities that you can love even if you don’t use all of it. I liked doing this review because it reminded me of how much more it can do than I take advantage of! As always I measure a tool’s real value by whether I keep using it after I first find it, and KIT has been in my toolbox for over a year, and I keep using it, so it must be great, right? KIT is shareware at $25 US and you can download a free 15 day trial, so check it out at reinventedsoftware.com.