Filed under: Software, Productivity
kip - iPhoto for your documents (digital or otherwise)
kip is one of the few applications to take a real stab at helping you organize all your documents, both digital and 'real world'. It combines the look and feel of iPhoto with the real world aggregate paradigm of Delicious Library, then tosses in some really slick tagging and .Mac syncing features for that finishing shine. On the left is a dynamically scaling tag cloud that keeps track of all the tags you've used on all documents. Mouse over it and smaller tags will scale up in size to help you read them better. Mouse over a document (as you see in the screenshot) and a live preview of that section of the document is displayed next to your mouse. Documents can be viewed from within kip or opened externally via Preview.
The 'real world' aspect enters the scene when kip's scan function is used, as this app wants to help you organize all your documents, including those receipts and old tax returns that are just decomposing in a box somewhere.
One of the drawbacks I've found after poking around with kip is that it seems very focused in the kinds of files it will accept. It takes picture files and PDFs, but not text files or (not surprisingly) Word docs. Overall though, this is a clever app with a nice implementation. It offers a lot of handy methods for storing all sorts of metadata, including author and URL, and seems to be one of the first i-app-like applications to do tagging well (hint hint, Apple!).
This initial version of kip is free, but as its product site plainly states: the next version will require the purchase of a license, with the price TBD. Grab a copy while it's hot, and free!
[via digg]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Brandon said 10:40AM on 7-30-2006
Kip has great potential however viewing PDFs in it is severely lacking. There arent any zoom buttons or page flippers. It's similar to viewing a PDF in Safari. They should use some navigation ideas from Acrobat.
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Chris said 11:25AM on 7-30-2006
Brandon, ctrl/right click gives you zoom options and a couple of others things...
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Brandon said 11:36AM on 7-30-2006
I'm aware of that, but it's lacking options compared to Acrobat. For instance, it should have the option to automatically resize the PDF to the fit the width of the window and an option to automatically resize the PDF to fit the height of the window. These are pretty crucial features for a decent PDF viewer.
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Nigel said 11:39AM on 7-30-2006
I tried Kip a few weeks ago. I have 700+ pdfs and I've been looking for some way to manage them centrally and locate information quickly. Kip looks promissing but I don't think it's quite there yet. I noted the navigation issues, and it crashed repeatedly when I tried to import my pdfs. The 1.0.1 version has an import limit of around 50 files at a time. The developers seemed responsive to emails but they haven't come up with the next release that they said woudl fix the import problem yet.
I might try Kip again in the future. If only because I don't see any other apps out there that have the same focus on managing just pdfs. But right now it isn't robust enough for me.
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Chris said 11:42AM on 7-30-2006
Fair enough, personally I never use Acrobat to view PDFs, can't stand that software, so each to their own I guess.
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heat said 12:17PM on 7-30-2006
the file tagging module for quicksilver is cool too.
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umijin said 12:39PM on 7-30-2006
Hmmm.... This article is very similar to that just posted on FreeMacWare.com, even with the tag line, "like iPhoto for your documents".
What's up with that?
Oh well... you know what they say about immitation and flattery.
Kip is a cool app, though it certainly has some maturation to go before it's truly useful.
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David Chartier said 12:51PM on 7-30-2006
#7: I (apparently) used the same tag line because the app's author wrote it on kip's site.
MacMinute, other blogs and even digg used the same line in their headline too.
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Wysiwyg said 4:29PM on 7-30-2006
At first kip looked promising, but i found it inadequate for me. I have a mess of webarchives, docs and pdfs that need some effort to be organize, and this program just can't do it. So i looked around and found a program named Journler. The first time i used it i really hated, but then the version 2.0.2b fixed many of the issues i got before. Journler feels like an iTunes for my docs and is free. Grab it here:
http://journler.phildow.net/
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almograve said 4:46PM on 7-30-2006
This software seams cool but it isn't ready yet...I realy don't like the fact that all documents are showing all mixed together, there's n folder management....too bad...the taging is cool, the "automatic" taging is interesting but come on...the list of tags on the left part is clearly turning into a big mess after a few documents imported...one basic thing it should do is to be able to scan folder and at least use the name of the folder as a tag...
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