Review: Keep Yourself Together With Together.

Yes, we live a digital life, and the Mac is center stage, the tool we use for the web, email, chatting, photos, movies, music, and syncing everything together.

That means Mac utilities carry the burden of helping us to keep all those things together, one place, easy to find and use. Text clippings, documents, images, movies, sounds, bookmarks, and email messages.

That’s what Together does. We’ve long extolled the virtues of elegant software. 1,200 features doesn’t mean much if you can’t figure out how to use them, right?

Together is the drag and drop queen of storing all those nitty gritty little details in one place, where they can be tagged, previewed, stored, and, importantly, found when you want to find them.

You know me, right? I don’t like to spend money on anything if there’s a better way to do the same thing for no money. Less money is good. No money is better. Together is sufficiently sweet enough to use than I’m really not too interested in what it costs, though Together doesn’t cost much, considering what it does.

What Together does is at once simple and complex. Simple because you can drag and drop and save what you come across on your Mac each day. True, most of our music goes to iTunes, photos go to iPhoto, movies go to iMovie’s new Library feature.

That covers a lot of file saving and file managing territory. Thank you, Apple.

What about everything else? What about those little snippet text clippings you come across that you want to save for use later? I used to send myself all that stuff as email, and use Mail to save it. Don’t do that. Managing email is bad enough.

Sometimes you’ll come across web videos or movie clips that you want to save in a place where you can get to it later so you can send it to someone else. Together does that. Ditto for photos, sounds, and—here it comes—web page. Again, Together is a storage hub for all those digital items that you want to hold on to and do something with but not until you’re ready to do it.

Instead of scattering pieces of digital cruft all over your Mac, drag and drop them into Together, so they’ll be in one spot. Together has a handy shelf so when you drag an item, whatever it is, to the shelf, the shelf opens, displays your folders organized the way you want, then sucks in whatever your drug. Or dragged.

Whatever you dragged (or drug) to Together is copied in the background so you never really have to bounce back and forth between Mail or Safari or Word or whatever, and the place where you save your whatevers.

Together has a built in note taking capability which also handles web page bookmarks and Web Archives. Those are replicas of web pages you visit, and they’re editable in Together so you can delete the annoying stuff on the page.

Mac OS X Leopard has this neat feature called Quick Look which lets you preview the contents of a file—document, presentation, photo, graphic image, PDF, movie, whatever. Together has a similar Portrait Preview for many different file formats, too.

The problem that most of us have with Mac utilities that claim to organize all we do on our Macs is that we have to learn how to use the features, instead of the features adapting to our convoluted ways of organizing. Together lets you organize in ways you already understand. Think iTunes playlists. Think iPhoto albums. Think folders inside folders, but organized the way you want.

Together’s little shelf means getting Together is just a mouse movement away (or, use the handy hotkey combination).

That’s a feature I love about DragThing, and Together carries it a step further because you can actually create quick notes right inside the shelf, so there’s no need to jump over to another application or utility.

Alright, so you can drag and drop and store almost everything in your Mac’s digital world onto a shelf for safekeeping. Now what? Once you have a bunch of items stored, how do you get to them? Together searches as you type in the search field, and Spotlight is employed to grab what you think you need during the search. Fast.

Just to show you how much value Apple packed into Mac OS X Leopard and how different it is under the hood from Tiger, Together is Leopard ONLY. That lets Together take advantage of some of the new technology in Leopard not found in Tiger or Panther.

Yes, there area dozen Mac utilities which organize this or that, and some of them are superbly crafted tools. What I’ve always wanted was something that didn’t require me to think yet I could still use it to manage text clips, documents, images, photos to send, web pages, bookmarks, PDFs, and so on.

That’s Together, yet another sweetly crafted Mac utility to help Mac users stay on top of the world. See, you got on top of the world when you chose a Mac. Staying there requires a little help.

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