Yep: Organize the documents that clutter your life

Originally downloaded 7/19/06. Yep (it was called “Kip” when I first downloaded it) isn’t thinking just of the PDFs that you download from the web or pass around the office. No, Yep has integrated scanner functions that would let you transform all that “paper clutter” in your house into an electronic archive, with a gorgeous, innovative interface for finding it later. Yep has a built-in PDF viewer, organization tools like iPhoto, and also a Tag Cloud feature that lets you see your document store’s tags the way we techhies have become accustomed. (Yep is free during its beta stage, but will not be free forever.) I have to admit this is a cool concept!

Update 9/2/06 Kip became Yep in the month since I first tried it out. Besides the earlier features, Yep now has an ingenious magnifying glass that lets you quickly see whether the small thumbnails you’re browsing are the documents you want. It’s still at an early stage of development, but the prospects for this software are quite exciting.

Update 9/27/06 I’m in love! Yep is one of those software tools that presents a whole new, immediately intuitive approach for tackling a problem that’s as old as the PC itself. I remember when Adobe first released Acrobat, circa 1994. Adobe wasn’t selling PDF as an online format, or for its hypertext prowess, or for collaboration, or any of the other ways in which we use PDF nowadays. Nope… PDF was sold as a path to the paperless office! Yeah, right. I was a beta tester for the first scan-to-PDF product Adobe released, called Capture. Capturing paper documents to PDF was going to be a very big deal. It has become big in certain niche markets, but it certainly isn’t mainstream. You don’t find very many people scanning documents into PDF in 2006.

And yet, PDF is perfect for this. And after trying out Yep a few times, I’m convinced it’s going to be a fixture in the Scott household for the forseeable future. Let me give you just a quick use case for Yep, based on my actual experience.

Yesterday, my wife emails me to say that the real estate agent who’s trying to sell our house wants a copy of some papers we received from the State a month or so ago. A prospective buyer is interested in a potential financial implication of the requested papers. Do we have an electronic copy of the paperwork? Heck no. The real estate agent wants to know if we have a fax machine. LOL!

As I wrote to her in my email along with the freshly minted PDF copy of the papers she asked for, isn’t it time for Fax to die? What a ridiculous technology here in 2006. Why do we cling to fax, you ask? Frankly, it’s because Windows users have no convenient way of digitizing paper documents into a usable form like PDF. That’s because Microsoft, in its greedy wisdom (sorry about that!), has chosen to not support PDF in its operating system. Otherwise, we’d all be using something like Yep.

With Yep, I just slip the paper on my scanner, click a plus sign to tell Yep I want to add a scanned document, and scan. In a moment I have my PDF file in the Yep window. From here, I can crop the document to my heart’s content (or not), add more pages to it, or click “Done.” Once Done, I have two simple buttons to choose from–Print, or Mail. Of course, I just click “Mail,” enter the real estate agent’s address, add a few choice words, and hit send.

Now, at this point I could just toss the PDF file, or I could make it part of a permanent document store. This is where Yep’s iPhoto-like features come into play. With Yep, I can organize the documents very flexibly into “collections,” and I can add tags to them. Besides my own key words, Yep automatically adds a few of its own based on some prominent words it reads while scanning, as well as the document title I give it. To find a document in the archive, I can browse the collection by key word or by album, or I can use the powerful built-in search.

While browsing, Yep presents thumbnails of each document, as well as a sort of loupe that I can use to magnify portions of the document to get a better look without opening it all the way. The loupe also shows me all the key words for each document as I browse. Like iPhoto, Yep gives me a slider to control how big the thumbnails are… going from tiny all the way to full size. But wait… there’s more! For each collection or for individual documents, Yep has an ingenious “info” pane that slides in from the right. It incorporates all the details you could ever want to know, gives you access to Yep’s keyword editor, and provides convenience links to Finder data about the doc.

One of the first things I did was import all the PDF’s I’ve collected in my “Web Receipts” folder… the result of using Apple’s built-in PDF workflow item from the print dialogue box. This way, Yep makes it super easy to browse or search and find the receipt I’m looking for. The more I’ve used Yep, the more I’m convinced it will be a great way to eliminate all the paper clutter I’ve been collecting for years. While that will take some time, I can at least begin right away to use Yep for new paper that I’m tempted to file away in a paper folder.

Yep has numerous details that are part and parcel of a great Mac software product. For example, it supports .Mac syncing, so you can use .Mac as the storehouse, making it accessible wherever you are around the globe. Yep also leverages Apple’s “smart” folder technology, so you don’t have to just get by with old-fashioned “dumb” folders. In the preferences you’ll find you can customize the color scheme of Yep’s various window panes, and you can also fine-tune the way Yep auto-tags your documents.

Auto-tagging is another innovative feature Yep employs that I believe is key to the success of the “paperless office.” Nobody likes tagging, or has time to do it well, so we must be able to rely on some artificial intelligence in our software in order to keep paper warehouses like this organized.

And you know one of Yep’s features that I sure wish other Mac software developers would emulate? Like a web browser, Yep has back/forward buttons in the toolbar, which let me browse back through each and every view I’ve visited during a browse/search session. This is incredibly useful, as it is in the Finder, for example. Yet it’s missing from important Apple applications like Mail, where it would be especially appreciated, and iTunes as well (except in the iTunes store).

Of course, a Mac OS X app like Yep wouldn’t be complete without some gratuitous visual stimulation. Fulfilling that need, one of the most recent additions the Yep developers made was a little eye-candy in the left-hand column. Here, you can toggle between browsing by tag and browsing by “collection.” The toggle now quite gratuitously employs a nifty cube animation to get me there. And that’s just scratching the surface… If you try out Yep, you’ll notice a slew of cool, unobtrusive visual niceties, most of which have some practical benefit as well. For example, when you’re browsing by tag, Yep temporarily displays a small badge on the documents that have each tag.

Yep is still a beta product, and the developers promise we’ll have to pay for it some day. Frankly, that’s OK as long as they don’t get greedy. For software as good as Yep, I’ll be happy to shell out a few bucks to support the effort.

Version as tested: 1.1b4