Howdy,

Let me first say that my goal is only to make Yep better with my comments, and by no means meant to be cruel.

That said, I'm wondering exactly what direction Yep is being taken. It was last updated in August of 2008, almost 18 months ago. In today's day and age that an eternity. Since then, Evernote has raise a second round of financing of $5m and continued to release major updates and grow. I still think Yep is better in some aspects, but Evernote is closing in on most of those, and better in some areas.

My main question is why release products like Deep, when you have a great core product that is in desperate need of an update? I'm guessing its because you've found the easiest growth engine is selling new products to existing customers. Although this is generally the easiest sales channel, its pretty limiting. The real way to grow is to develop a best in class application and keep it cutting edge.

I hope these comments are received with someone of an open mind, because I really do love Yep, and want it to succeed, I'm just having a harder and harder time sticking with it.

Target

@Target: Thanks for your comments (and I understand and appreciate your motives). We are working on Yep but we also have other products and implementations of our research that require some of our efforts.

Understand that we are a very small development house and do not have people talking to venture capitalists to finance our products. Evernote, while a good product, is not a better product because of it's investment inflow. They just are well connected (and perhaps, savvy) enough to convince investors that their idea will make them a ton of money. We, on the other hand, are just trying to put out great products that serve a need and make our customers happy. Simple? Yes. Honest? Absolutely. >.<

PS: If you have an extra million dollars to give to us we won't complain! 8^)

Kregerator:

Yep isn't going away anytime soon. 8^) And thanks for the understanding words… we would love to have a staff of 30 programmers and more time and money for all our ideas but then we'd have to start wearing smoking jackets and ascots, and learn to act snooty! ;^)

Jim

Hi Target (et al),

Thanks very much for your comments. I just wanted to fill in some of the backstory. When we first started working on Leap we had in our mind that we were working on Yep 2.0 but as we got further along and as we started receiving feedback from beta testers it became apparent that Leap was being used in new ways and that Yep users liked the simplicity of Yep and didn't want us to change it radically. So we made the decision to release Leap as Leap and not as Yep 2.0 while keeping Yep and thought the market would tell us which way to go. (We also gave everyone who had bought Yep before Leap was released a free copy of Leap). Deep was also a bit of an experiment for us. We wanted to see if there was some way of keeping the focus of a product like Yep but because it was new it let us try some radically different approaches that we didn't want to initially try out on our Yep customers because the approaches were too different. Which brings us to today and what we've learned. One of the things we have definitely learned is that people really like the way Yep works and that it continues to be one of our most popular products. And with that in mind, we are planning on bringing out a new Yep 2.0 some time in the not too distant future. We've learned a lot about tagging and have improved the underlying technologies greatly in our work of the past 18 months and we intend to fold a lot of this work back into Yep but keeping the focus and simplicity that people seem to really like about Yep. Thanks again for the feedback,

Ted Leckie

<strong>Guest:</strong><br /><br />If I may add something here: What your website is in bad need of, is a NEWS SECTION. I think many people wonder what is going on with Yep, Leap, or other programs. People don't want (and don't do) dig the forum like I just did to find an information like in this thread (which is to some extent encouraging, at least there IS work going on). Which major website doesn't feature a news section / ticker? The way it appears at the moment to the average visitor is that - except for new product releases - NOTHING is going on here. I believe many people would be relieved if only they new that Yep and Leap ARE being worked on. Maybe a few words on planned features? Or a poll of mostly requested features? Links to beta versions? Just ANY info, like the one in this thread. It's not a lot of work but I'm sure it would have a huge effect on customer satisfaction. I agree with the previous poster to gladly pay for an upgrade since Yep is one of my most important programs.

Btw, my top priority requested Yep features are: 5-star rating (please!!! so important!), flagging (same as Leap has), assigning colors to files, allowing any type of file in Yep (such as HTML, Word, etc. - but still keeping the Yep interface). I use Yep for storing and searching scientific papers and I think it outperforms anything on the market (tried Sente, Papers, among others) due to its brilliant implementation of tagging.

All the best,
Marcus

Marcus,

For a 5-star rating system, I simply use the tags: "*", "**", "***", "****", "*****". Then, create smart folders to search for those tags.

For flagging, I use "!" as a tag.

Hopefully, that's helpful.

Regards,
Tom

<strong>Guest:</strong><br /><br />Good to read YEP continues to be developed :-) I love it, as I see many others do too!

The complimentary copy of LEAP was much appreciated (thank you!), but looking back I realise I rarely use it. Trying to figure out why reminded me - I was once brought up short when it was explained to me that Adobe Bridge wasn't a database but merely a viewer and so couldn't be used for any images not present on the hard-drive it was installed on... I thought about this for a while and then it clicked. To track all my photos and documents I need a &lt;i&gt;database&lt;/i&gt; I can consult. For viewing I might as well use Preview.

As it happens I use Extensis's Portfolio for my photos and off-line documents... and this brings me around to something I would dearly like YEP to do: off-line storage. This makes it suddenly more of a database, I realise, but I'd much rather use YEP to catalogue my PDFs than Portfolio. And I'd much rather keep my growing collection of PDFs safely on an external drive.

Once YEP can intuitively manage my off-line store it will suddenly make all that investment of time creating useful tags all the more relevant.

Keep up the great work!! :-D

I too wondered why Ironic kept releasing new products while their first ones continued to have a certain level of work needed. There were regular issues with tags which is address with the new tagging system. So, I mostly wondered why they would come out with a new, needed tagging system that was implemented in their new products before they updated their first products. For a small company, you have a lot of projects going on.

On the other hand, I get that your approach is not to simply collect new feature requests and keep implementing them. You seem to focus on making an app that does what it says and sticking with it. Your products are innovative and worth every penny. However, I hate to say that I reluctantly started using another app to capture PDF's instead of YEP because the Yepshot just doesn't work consistently. YEP is such a great app but I just need it to capture PDF's as well as some of the similar products out there. When there hasn't been an update in a long time there is a tendency to migrate to another solution.

All that said, Leap 2.0 is looking fantastic. I hope it does really well.

Yeah, I'm guessing it's a lot harder than it looks to turn a web page into a perfectly formatted pdf.

Much, much harder than it looks. The sophistication gets harder and harder to translate. Also bear in mind that all mechanisms are not delivering equal results either.

1. Feature request for Yep 2.0 (assuming it's not vaporware): please provide a preference to automatically move documents to the Yep Documents folder. I use Yep like iPhoto and want it to organize my document for me. It gets annoying to have to confirm moving every document.

2. I've been using Yep since it was the Kip beta. I love it, I depend on it to organize my important documents, but it's getting long in the tooth and the attention Ironic is giving to shiny new apps is disheartening. Dance with the one that brought ya, fellas! I currently have 840 documents in my "To file in Yep" folder and adding more daily. I'm not moving these into Yep until I know the future of the app. I'm also actively looking for an alternative that's still being developed. I don't want to go through al the work of tagging new documents until I have a little more experience with Yep 2.0 and decide if I really want to mess with MessWithApplesMetaDataMeta, err I mean, OpenMeta. It would sure be nice to get something, even an alpha release just to know you're actually doing something with Yep.

Cheers,
Rhet

OpenMeta "is" powerful. I haven't even really kicked the tires enough but I fell a lot more comfy about keeping track of data for future projects now that OpenMeta is here and working.

As soon as Mailtags, Hazel and DEVONthink support OpenMeta I'm in hog heaven. It's actually amazing how "few" applications need to explicityly support
OpenMeta to make a big impact. It really comes down to what apps are your "Bread n Butter" for productivity.

I'm anxiously awaiting Yep 2.0 as well because I have a huge PDF folder that I'd like to not have to sift through either but hop on in the waters warm.

@Jim

Hi Jim,

You don't need Yep 2 to try out OpenMeta. Try Fresh, or Tagit, or Default Folder X. I don't think you realize what a powerful technology it is.

I do realize how powerful it is and was initially excited. I'm also a software developer, I've followed the debates, and I've read the OpenMeta code. And I'm not convinced that I'm ready to trust my data to OpenMeta. Apple could break this in a heartbeat and they probably wouldn't care. I'm also concerned about some of the design choices made (e.g. namespace, backup of tags)--I won't second guess Tom & Ted, but I'm not necessarily ready to trust those choices either.

I'll wait until Yep is ready to really give OpenMeta a run for it's money. I've played with Tagit. I have no interest in Leap...have tried it several times since it was first released and don't find it useful. I want Yep!

The only assumption I can form of Yep is that it is not being developed with the same interest as Leap, etc. That may be false, but there's certainly no indication from Ironic that that's not the case. I know it's a small company, but you keep coming out with new things which means there's fewer man-months to go towards Yep. ;-)

Cheers!
--Rhet

@BLUEFROG

I completely agree that Yep is a mature application and prior to OpenMetadata showing up on the scene I truly didn't feel there were any features that I had to have -- that has now changed because now I don't want to maintain multiple tag dictionaries. I want my Fresh tags to also be my Yep tags, other than that I have no needs/wants for Yep 2.0 but I would like to organize and streamline my tag library to work across the 2 applications I love (actually I like TagIt better, but the fact that it no longer has a dock has made me use Fresh)

I, too, have been wondering about Yep 2.0. Yep is the app that brought me to the Ironic party (back when it was the Kip beta) and I've been in love ever since. Yep remains the only Ironic app I use. I think Leap is great, but most of my documents/data is managed these days (ie: iTunes, email, iPhoto, Yep, etc), so Leap is of very little use to me. If I had a lot of files to organize, I'm sure I'd love it. Deep is a UI abomination and a huge disappointment. I was really looking forward to Yep for photos. Instead, I'm sticking with iPhoto. As for Tagit and Fresh: interesting, but not essential to my workflow.

Yep is the app that needs the most attention because it's the app with the broadest appeal. Everyone uses PDFs these days. I've shown Yep to numerous people and they've all been gaga over it. Many have bought it. Yep could be *THE* standard PDF organizer and paperless office solution. Leap is a bit more specialized and I don't think many users will give Deep a second look until some serious changes are made. I don't know, as some here have suggested, that Ironic's business model is to release new apps to generate revenue at the expense of updating existing ones. I've had enough email exchanges with Tom and Ted to know that these guys are passionate about their work and excited to bring new technologies and concepts to their users. But I *do* think there's been too much focus on expanding the Ironic product offerings at the expense of developing the cash cow, Yep.

Yep 2.0 needs:

#1 Feature!!! OCR and PDF optimization. Right now I have to run my scans through Acrobat first. Thankfully Acrobat came with the ScanSnap. I'd hate to have to buy Acrobat just to use Yep more efficiently. And Acrobat is pretty lousy anyway. I wish I didn't have to use it!

Update the cloud! Please, whatever you do, don't make it look like Leap's cloud or, worse, Deep. But add features! Allow users to eliminate documents based on tags (ie: shift-click the tag to hide all documents). Some of these features are already supported in other Ironic apps...

Bug fixes! There are many required. I just discovered a new (for me) issue. If I copy a two word tag, ie: las_vegas, and paste it, it pastes in as two tags: "las" and "vegas".

I'd also like to see Yep offer more features for working with PDFs. For example, I frequently find myself making a new PDF out of several existing ones. Yep allows for PDFs to be combined, which is nice, but what if I want to take a page for PDF 1 and a page from PDF 2 and make a new third document out of them? I'd like to see Yep offer some sort of PDF composition feature. I imagine being able to drag and drop pages from as many documents to a composition area/shelf, rearrange them, then generate a new PDF complete with tag inheritance from the source PDFs.

Finally, I've said it before and I'll say it again, I really think Ironic should get serious about standardizing UI and terminology. For example, I'm most turned off by Deep's UI, even though some of the features (find by size and color) are *really* attractive. They are not, however, attractive enough to make me learn yet another UI and deal with yet another set of inconsistencies and quirks. I'm attracted to tagging and, so far, Ironic offers the best solutions. But the UI has to appeal and I find the current smorgasbord of Ironic UIs rather annoying. Imagine if every Adobe app looked and felt totally different, used different terminology, implemented keyboard shortcuts differently, etc. The user does not benefit one bit. And the company doesn't benefit either because users are less likely to buy multiple apps if they don't look and feel the same.

Here's hoping for a Yep 2.0 beta - with a killer feature set - soon!

Yep is not "totally based on Spotlight Comment tagging" - too the contrary, it bypassed the need for it and used it's own database to store its data. In fact, none of our products are "based on Spotlight Comment tagging". There are more than a few discussions about the unreliable nature of these types of tags so we chose to stop supporting it in our other products as well..

What bugs have made it unusable for you?

Jim

the fact that it's twice lost all of my Tags and periodically applies the wrong tags to various documents.

I'm sorry you've had some issues with tagging but your issues have not been reproducible. Is it something you can repeat? If so, then please provide the steps to repeating the behavior you see.

You now don't advocate Spotlight Tagging, but previously pushed this as a key feature.

I am not sure where you got this idea from but we have never pushed Spotlight Comment tagging as a "key feature". We may have said it is possible to use but that's about it. (In fact, I think we've made it a bit more difficult to use by forcing a User to select the option manually.)

stuartleitch: have you used Leap, too? In my case, I've experienced regular tag corruption in Yep (tags being applied to a subset of my documents) because of Leap.

I reported the problem and the Ironic folks were able to find the bug, but I have since deleted Leap and stopped using it altogether. It isn't that useful and Yep is WAY more important for me.

And yes, I am still waiting for Yep to finally see some development. It is badly neglected right now.

@jrychter:

It is badly neglected right now.

Umm… we are deep in development and have been for awhile.

@Guest:
1. Speaking of timetables is a dangerous thing for a developer to do. Many Users disregard or misinterpret the work "estimate" and cry "Foul!" when their expectations are not met. That being said, we are estimating a public beta this month if things continue to progress as they have been.

2. Though the upgrade policy has not been set yet, the odds are good that it would be a free upgrade for someone purchasing now. (This is usually how we do things, as evidenced by the great deal we offer on the bundle.)

Thanks for the kind words.

Jim

Bluefrog,
on May 11th you wrote " I don't even have a private build myself so I'm waiting along with you guys." regarding a Yep 2.0 beta

Have you gotten one yet? It's ok to tell me it is none of my business. But if you have and you'll tell me, I'll take it as a hopeful sign.

James

Thank you! By the way, I finally bought and registered the Leap 2 bundle. Don't use Leap much, just my way of contributing...

James

I am not yet aware of all that YEP can do. In fact, I was not going to get Yep even though I had seen it spoken of here and there around the net. I do know it is very popular and well respected by many. I purchased the bundle but only because it was just a bit more than Leap alone, and I did that primarily because Deep offered a feature I see nowhere else, finding photos by comparing colors. I considered Yep a tag along app at best in the bundle (no pun intended). ;-)

But boy howdy was I wrong about Yep. I too thought with Leap, why would you want Yep? And perhaps that is even a true statement, I don't know. But there are well over 1K of PDFs on my mac, and certainly more are due. How wonderful it is to have an app that finally shows me the way to actually use a library. It's like when I was a child and I walked into my first public (or school) library. I felt overwhelmed by all the stacks of books, magazines, and periodicals. Then a kind librarian showed me how to use the card catalogue dewy decimal system to find anything I Wanted to find, and how to walk to the right shelve where the book should be located. Yep has just become that friendly librarian to me all over again. Suddenly I See that, while I have a ton of organizing yet to do, and tons of scanning now to do, if makes sense to me for the first time that I really can see myself totally depending on Yep. I write, as well as do photography. Deep helped me find duplicate pictures and Yep is going to help me with research. My girlfriend who is a CPA is already jealous as she is still on a PC. She scans stacks of client data for tax returns that have to be kept and researched.

Leap is a God send for me on a more global level. It is finally allowing me to gain access to all my projects, all my thoughts, goals, etc. I would say the key difference I see in Leap vs Yep is that in Yep it frequently matters that I view any document I find and I am given the choice to view it in Yep or an external viewer. But even with quick look I can scroll pages. Leap on the other hand, while allowing me to look quickly full page with quick look too, is really not something that I plan to use for accessing my files. Leap is more for finding, sorting, categorizing and staying on task, keeping on purpose.

I don't care (right now) if Apple breaks OpenMeta or not in the future. I hope they don't but, this tag system has finally allowed me to come out of depending on a folder structure. Folder structure has always been hard for me. This tag oriented system, for me, is like rediscovering the mac all over again for the first time. Not only can I do highly creative things quite visually, and intuitively (the Mac environment), but, I can also finally organize that way too. I have seen many apps that promised to do this over time, tried the ones that had tabs on the side of the screen which popped out, still using Butler .. but never have I found such a total solution before.

My main, recurring wish with Ironic Software apps is that all their apps will learn to use just a single database of tags such that changing one apps tags will also affect the available tags in the other apps at the same time. I want to standardize my tags globally.

Anyway, I will soon be scanning lots more docs into Yep. Only then will I have more intelligent comments to offer in how it feels to really use YEP and ask for feature requests. I really don't know enough yet to do that.

David

@jamwilki (et al):
Thanks for your continued patience. I can't say exactly where we are yet but I am working with an alpha right now. One of the things people may not realize is that Yep, being our most "mature" app had some older code that needed to be replaced. With changes in technology and finding newer and better ways to code we needed to strip down parts and rebuild them from the ground up. Also, we have been working on some ideas with Yep that will affect our other apps as well.

I'll post as soon as something is ready for you.

Cheers,
Jim

Thanks for the excellent review, David.

I think it deserves promotion to a new thread where more people are likely to see it and for easier future reference.

Coooolll!

Or as my Aussie (Oz) friends say, good on ya mate.

David

I agree with earlier comments that some kind of one-way news/announcements section would be good.

Me, too. Especially for reasons like this:

It would give Jim an opportunity to pick up on some persistent themes buried in the forum and bring some kind of closure.

Hi Jim,

Can you type a few further cryptic syllables to save us from mental dehydration ... ? ;-)

Lance

Well, cryptic is what we've come to expect ... and you haven't disappointed us this time any more or any less than any other in recent weeks. That said, if you did feel able to release a few non-cryptic syllables to follow, that may at least rescue a few Yeppies from self harm ...

I'm ready for another morsel, too.

James

Do people who keep asking for status reports, etc. think Jim holds back info once it's ready to be made public? ;)

We're just playing a kind of game with him while we wait. Boredom. Like kids waiting for Christmas ...

At least it's not like kids squabbling. ;-) My favorite line was from an old friend. She said once when her boy and girl were young and sitting in the back seat of her car on some long trip, the boy complained very loudly. "MOM, She's breathing my air!!!"

I can't say why but I always loved that story. I guess the good folks at Ironic are breathing their own air right now. ;-)

David

Concurring with many of the comments made here ... Yep is a great application that will continue to garner more and more users. For years I have been trying to tame the document monster ... and with Yep as an ally ... I have probably come the closest to actually taming it. But I do believe as many do here that more focused attention is required ... and this forum is making that happen.
So, if an "alpha" is in the works, I definitely want to sign up for testing. And here are a few of my pet peeves on usability ...

1. In my case, I define the destination for a scanned document in ScanSnap Manager (the Fujitsu ScanSnap Utility) ... the document ends up in this big repository from where I have to select it and move it to the right location. Would it be possible to add an action in the context sensitive menu on folders in the "tracking locations" column that would allow - "Redirect to here ...". That would help my workflow tremendously, I gather all the documents destined for a particular location and I can scan all of them and know they are going to the proper location without having to move them.

2. It seems that once the combined volume of the "tracking locations" reaches 5 to 6Gb ... the system slows down considerably. Can something be done to speed up the process?

Again thanks for the encouraging remarks about Yep and its ensuing incarnations ...

Here is a beta of Yep 2:

Known bugs:
Scanning on OS X 10.5 crashes everytime you scan a new page (at least on my computer).


Features:

• Scanning on OS X 10.6 works, and works better than on 10.5.


• Yep 2 can track files any where, and of any kind.


• If you have Yep 1, running this beta or Yep 2.0 when it ships will not alter any Yep 1 data.


• There is a small 3 page partial manual.


• Yep 2 can convert dragged text, images, etc to auto filed files.


• The Filed Documents folder replaces Yep Documents, and is day by day based.


• 64 bit on Snow Leopard.

Requires 10.5.8, but some features only available on 10.6.

http://www.ironicsoftware.com/beta/Yep_2.0.0b1.zip"

--Tom

<strong>Guest:</strong><br /><br />THANK YOU TOM!!!! Please make sure we pay you for your efforts!

Ok… next up is Yep 2.0.0b3. And some notes…

File transfer should now always move/copy when told to do so.**

Yep now leaves any documents in Pending Documents, instead of auto filing them.

New info window - with 'copy button'.

Fixed bugs in info window, inspector windows.

Dropping files onto Yep now works better.

Filing by dragging to a bookmark now has 'done' feedback, works better.

Fixed a hang that sometimes occured on switching into Yep

Dropping files on Yep no longer takes you to the 'wrong' place.

New backup options for OpenMeta - including single file backup and restore (File menu).

Abililty to read tags, etc from Yep 1 or Leap 1 installs at any time (Restore Metadata..).

Thanks to the beta testers so far - great feedback.

** Check this one out!
1. When you Move a file, it moves the file - even if the target is remote (like an external drive. Note: This has not been tested on every device so please report if you find any this doesn't work with.)!
2. If you hold the Option key when using the context menu, "Move to Folder…" will change to "Copy to Folder…". (Note: This doesn't change the entry in the File menu and a bug has been filed.)