Friday Freebie. Organize Your Cluttered Life.

By looking at all the Mac applications that help me run my life, dozens and dozens of them, you’d think I was an Organizationalholic.

Here’s one of those wonderfully elegant Mac apps for organizing something you’ve probably neglected. Your PDFs. If Yep would just do everything else.

My documents folder is well organized these days. I think of it as a shoebox with partitions.

There’s documents, manuals, spreadsheets, Powerpoint and Keynote files, Word files, even old AppleWorks files.

For the most part, like iTunes songs, my documents just sit there. I use a few regularly, but the rest just sit there.

That makes finding older documents a bit of a pain since I’m organized for placement and location but not for content.

Along comes little Yep, a document organizer that does what a Mac does best. Clean, simple, elegant, intuitive, and free*. For now.

Yep’s only problem is that it’s limited to organizing PDFs, Adobe’s little Portable Document Format that’s become so widely used these days.

I’ve been saving my online receipts as PDFs, and getting into the habit of storing other versions, too, not wanting to rely on Microsoft being around forever.

That means that I have a goodly number of PDFs clogging up my Mac’s Documents directory.

What Yep does is help you organize your PDFs, even helping you scan paper documents and storing them as PDFs.

In a brief fit of featuritis, Yep also stores images. I dropped in some GIFs and JPGs and PNGs, too.

That’s handy, but hardly a great feature.

When I think documents, I think of everything with an extension on it. XLS, DOC, HTML, PSD, and so on. Yes, PDFs are on the list.

Yep needs to take the iPhoto-like organizational metaphor and extend it beyond PDF’s borders.

Right in the center of Yep are the PDF documents. Roll your mouse pointer over a document and get a brief pop up view of what’s inside.

That’s cool, handy, intuitive. Got lots of PDFs? No problemo, as Yep lets your scroll through them just like iPhoto, complete with sizing bar to reduce or increase the size of the thumbnail.

The mouse pointer also acts as a magnifying glass. As you roll over certain parts of the PDF, it gets magnified in the pop up. Handy, handy, handy.

More featuritis creeps in here and there. Yep has synchronization capability with your .Mac account. I’m not sure why, but I thought you’d like to know.

Documents can also be “tagged” with key words, hence the search box in the tool bar at the top.

If you’ve used iPhoto, you’ll find Yep to be similarly easy to use. The problem is those darned PDFs. That’s about all you’re going to get.

After using Yep for just 10 minutes to try out the tools, I immediately wanted it to do more. That’s the good news.

The bad news is, well, Yep does PDFs. If you thousands or hundreds of PDFs in a business or organizaion, you’ll love Yep.

If you don’t, that’s OK. Yep is priced right and does some nifty work helping your organize, add keywords, and generally make PDF life easier.

Be forewarned, it took me 10 minutes to want Yep to do documents beyond PDFs.

I did come away with a neat feeling about the potential of Yep. This version is free, the next version, says the developer will be not free*.

In the effort to review Yep, I found out two things. First, I want Yep to do more than it does because what it does is really good.

Second, I found an excellent way to categorize, organize, keyword, and view all of my collection of comics pulled from online.

There’s Dilbert, Calvin & Hobbes, Shoe…