Kip it simple…

This is kip, a PDF browser for Mac OS X described as ‘iPhoto for PDF documents.’ I stumbled across it yesterday while scanning for news about my* favorite PDF application Adobe Acrobat. kip appears to use Mac OS X system services like PDF rendering and components of Spotlight search to make a fast, lightweight and very useful document browser.

kip attaches keywords called tags to your imported PDFs, which it generates algorithmically from the text. You can also apply tags of your own and otherwise edit them. The panel at the left shows the kip Cloud, a Flickr-like display where larger text means a more frequently-used tag.

Anyway, we have been proceeding with our attempt at a fully-paperless life - most of the bills come in electronically nowadays, and I scan everything else to PDF using a nifty motorized Fujitsu ScanSnap. Adobe Acrobat 7 OCRs the scanned files, making the text searchable, and then they go into a directory of folders on the half-terabyte array, one of our other summer projects.

So far, a file system directory has been the only navigation for the scans and other PDFs. I haven’t yet figured out the best way to do full-text indexing and search on the array’s CIFS volumes. kip provides an interesting alternative: index everything in kip using keywords, and use kip as the front end for the paperless project. Think we’ll do a quick prototype workflow and see how this works out…