The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Together (formerly KIT) remains one of my personal favorites in the area of file and note organization. I mentioned it last when the 2.1 release brought an array of oft-requested features. The latest update, version 2.2, adds some welcome additional features and fixes some existing issues. Highlights for the release include:

• Intelligent automatic tagging:

  This one is probably the most intriguing new feature, at least for me. It generates a certain number of tags (defined in preferences) based on tags you used on similar content in the past. It doesn't seem to read tags on items that existed prior to the upgrade or enabling automatic tagging, but it learns as it goes once you start using it. It's a little touch-and-go for me so far, but it's apparent that it's picking up on my habits as I continue to add new items. (See the update from the developer at the end of the article).

• Any or All boolean searches in the tag browser:

  This one was killing me in previous releases, which always treated multiple tag selections as "any," which (for me) defeated the purpose of multiple selections in a tag browser. Problem solved, the choice can be made in the view options of the tag browser.

• Groups and Smart Groups can be nested in folders:

  Depending on your organization method, grouping these items could prove to be a benefit. The previous version added the ability to automatically tag items added to a group or folder with tags set for that folder. With the option to perform that tagging on subfolders, the new group nesting feature allows for a hierarchical tagging system on groups, too.

• You can wrap selected items in a new group
• Tabs can be arranged by dragging
• Tabs can be activated by dragging to them

• Minimum dimensions can be set when importing web pages as PDFs:

  I love the PDF import feature of Together, which lets you save a web page as a PDF, keeping all of the text editable but in a more portable format than a web archive. It had a tendency to squish pages with certain CSS layouts, though. Another problem solved.

• Numerous fixes and features not mentioned in this abbreviated list

See the full release notes for Together 2.2 for a more in-depth list of the new features. Together remains $39USD, and is available at Reinvented Software.

Update: Together developer Steve Harris adds the following information regarding auto-tagging...

"When first enabled, Together builds up a map of the existing documents in your library and their corresponding tags. When documents are imported or saved, Together will analyse their content and tag them based on the tags for similar items.

To do this, Together is using a technology called Latent Semantic Mapping, which is built into Mac OS X, and is used by Mail.app to check for junk mail. As with Mail, it's possible the matches won't always be right, so if you change the tags on a document, Together will learn from that and in future, auto-tagging should be more accurate"