kip: Tag-smart iPhoto for PDFs
Described by the developers as “iPhoto for PDFs”, kip offers tagging, sorting, searching and syncing with iDisk for your PDFs. Its scanning features also promise a way to centralise and organise all those bills, receipts, reports, and other bits of paper laying around the house.
Screenshots and more on kip’s features after the jump.
After you import your PDFs, kip’s main interface presents a list of tags in a window on the left, sized by frequency, a main window containing iPhoto-like thumbnails of your documents and a Details window on the right:
Click on image for a larger view
One nice feature is provided by a “zooming” mouse pointer. kip displays a zoom window with a list of current tags wherever you hold your mouse over the PDF’s thumbnail:
The app’s Preferences pane allows you to list a series of tags that kip will search for automatically when importing, to sync your PDFs on your iDisk and to manage how tags are added:
Selecting an individual PDF produces a pane on the right that lists information and tags for that document.
The tags here—which I haven’t edited—demonstrate how kip will match Proper nouns but doesn’t always pick up the title of PDFs in its tagging.
Any MailTags 
user will be instantly at home here. Keywords can be added, deleted or edited. You can open an information Inspector for the document or open it with Preview. It also keeps an eye on your iDisk usage.
A scanning feature allows documents to be saved straight into the app. It also inserts an “Add to kip” to the PDF services in the Print menu of your apps, making it easy (if you remember) to add a copy of new documents to kip’s database.
It’s clever and innovative and slick, no question. I haven’t decided yet whether it adds enough to my productivity to replace the list of PDFs that a Spotlight search spits out. Time will tell.
The current version of kip (1.0.1) is free, although the developers warn that they will be charging for future versions of the app. You can get it from their web site .
[With thanks to Scott "This is Fricken great!" Morrison]
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Tags: documents, information management, iphoto, not apple mail, pdfs, Productivity, searching, tagging, tags
June 19th, 2006 at 9:25 am
Fantastic!! Thank you for writing about this app. I keep tons of PDFs of journal articles on my hard drive and have tried using an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of them, but I’ve been waiting for something like this to come along!
June 19th, 2006 at 5:14 pm
This is a really nifty, potentially groundbreaking product. I really like the concept. Tag-based categorization is just so much more flexible than folders for organizing and retrieving a large amount of stored items.
However, at the moment, I find their tag cloud a little weak. I’d prefer an iTunes-style tag browser, similar to how WebnoteHappy works, with the tag cloud as a visual alternative. The problem with the Kip cloud is it only shows the top 20-30 tags (that’s all there’s space for), so if you’re trying to browse for something you think you put in the database, if you have more than 30 tags, you may either have to remember the tag you used (if it’s not in the top 20-30, you can’t see it from the cloud) or take a stab at doing a blind search. From there, you can refine using the cloud, but the initial lookup is not smooth.
Also, Kip’s tag inference system is a little weak at the moment. I put the manual for GnuCash into it, a 70 page document with multiple uses of the word “GnuCash” on every page, but it didn’t extract that as a tag. It did, however, extract “Microsoft” as a tag, even though that word only appears 3 times in the whole manual. Maybe manually assigning tags is better anyway.
Despite the little wrinkles, a phenominal program.
June 19th, 2006 at 11:07 pm
Hi, one of the developers of kip here. Just thought I would mention in response to Bridget’s comment about Spotlight that there’s a nifty feature of kip: if you option-click on a tag in the kip cloud it will bring up a spotlight search for that tag. Also it is possible to drag any file from the finder onto a tag in the cloud and kip will assign that tag to the spotlight comments for the file thus making kip a more general file tagging program.
June 21st, 2006 at 2:04 am
That’s cool app. I would like to use it for scientific paper categorisation.
Export to other formats or XML interface to storage would be nice thing to have.