Kippt

Say hi to apps and APIs

Wed Apr 10 00:00:00 -0700 2013

Kippt’s API is little over year old now. It’s been a fantastic experience as we never expected how much it would be used for different kinds of apps or hacks. Personally it’s also the first API I have ever designed and build from the ground up so it’s hard not to get excited. Overall it has changed the way how we build Kippt as a product and a company to be more open about things (remember our open sourced extensions?)

Today we’re releasing Kippt’s new API to the public. It’s the same exact API that powers our web service which you’re familiar already. In terms of openness we wanted to open it complete for the public, even the parts we still consider to change in near future. This means that you can build your own version of Kippt and some people have already done this: during our alpha period Alex Robinson updated his Kippster app for iOS (formelly know as Clippt) to support the new API and Kippt’s social features. This came to us as a complete surprise and it’s been fantastic to follow the development as Alex has used a private Kippt list to gather feedback and comments regarding his beta builds.

As part of the new API we’re also publishing a complete developer site at developers.kippt.com and new API documentation is now moved to GitHub. As both projects are now publicly accessible at GitHub, and licensed under MIT, anyone can follow changes and even make improvements to them.

As part of the developer site we also added an app gallery where 3rd party developers can feature their apps, hacks and libraries. There’s already a good amount of projects listed including:

Kippster for Kippt (iOS) by alextrob
FeedLeap (RSS to Kippt) by jpadilla_
Keep It for Android by etaix
Klipps beta for OSX by raffael_me

On behalf of Kippt I hope you enjoy the new API and all the apps that people are creating for it. If you want to keep up with the latest developments, follow us on Twitter or join our developer mailing list.

-Jori

The future beyond bookmarking - Welcome to new Kippt

Tue Mar 19 00:00:00 -0700 2013

When we started building Kippt a couple of years ago, it was meant for saving and sharing links for ourselves. Since then the idea of collecting and finding useful information has grown on us. A few months ago we began to design Kippt from the ground up based on our experience and the thousands of feedback emails we have received during the past year.

The new Kippt is designed on the idea that everything can be referenced by a URL. A website, an article, a video, a note and a file can all have a URL and in most cases already do (just think about Google Docs and Dropbox). Not only does it make them accessible from the browser, but it makes things instantly sharable.

This is where we think the web has outgrown old-fashioned bookmarking: a link itself doesn’t say much about the content. Storing a link in itself isn’t valuable – it should be the content.

And this is where the new Kippt is different. Based on the content of the object you save, we do our best to show it on Kippt. On top of usual articles and videos we support everything from Dribbble shots to GitHub repositories and Speakerdeck presentations. We’ll be adding support for new services in the future but it’s already likely that we support your favorite services and content.

We want you to be able to save anything you find online and find it easily later, would that be after 5 minutes or 5 months. With the new Kippt you get a quick look at the content, we make it searchable based on the content and you can collect useful articles, videos or inspirational images into lists that can be shared with your friends or co-workers. Kippt is built for professionals who work on the web and depend on their knowledge.

During our beta period we have seen people use Kippt in more ways than we expected:

Collect design inspiration from Dribbble and Behance
Build a company-wide reading list of useful articles
Save useful GitHub repositories and blog posts when learning a new programming language
Research for school paper
Store your favorite music from Youtube and Soundcloud
Collections of animated gifs (yes, gifs are support in Kippt)

In addition to a more visual approach we’re also introducing notes that can be written and shared inside Kippt. They work great if you want to quickly write down a meeting memo or draft a documentation for your new web service. They’re all Markdown formatted and you can write in fullscreen just in your browser.

For our existing users, there’s a whole ton of new features including batch editing for clips, @-mentions, realtime notifications and emojis. We compiled a short list here. We have also heard that there will be new 3rd party apps coming to support new features.

We hope that you enjoy the new Kippt and will find it useful in your everyday life.

Jori & Karri

Add keyboard shortcut to the Kippt Chrome Extension

Fri Jan 11 00:00:00 -0800 2013

Kippt Chrome extension doesn’t have a keyboard shortcut (yet). However there is a way to set a keyboard shortcut for opening an extension.

How to set up a keyboard shortcut for an extension

Go to your Chrome extensions page Window > Extensions
From the bottom of the screen click “Configure Commands”
Set a shortcut, for example cmd+shift+k for Kippt
All done!

Maintenance break on Thursday 10th January 5AM PST

Wed Jan 09 00:00:00 -0800 2013

We’re moving Kippt to a new hosting provider tomorrow and because of that we’re having a scheduled maintenance break around 5AM PST (1PM GMT). The service will be down for approximately two hours.

We hope that this change will improve our reliability in the future. It’s also the first move towards some bigger changes on which we have been working on for the past few months.

Access your links with clipApp

Wed Nov 28 00:00:00 -0800 2012

I did it. I created an app. I have had a few ideas for small Mac OS X apps for a while. However, nothing so simple that I dared venture out and spend time and money to get it done ever presented itself.

At Kippt we love to build things but what we love even more is to see others building on top of what what we have already created. Above quote is from a blog post by Henning Molbaek, a Kippt user, who created clipApp which is a small menubar app for Mac OS X to access and search your Kippt archive. APIs are a great starting point for prototyping something small and we’re happy to see that Kippt’s API for these kind of small projects.

ClipApp is Henning’s first Mac app and it’s a must have if you want a quick access to your links. It’s currently available via Mac App Store at 30% discount for the rest of the November ($3.99). So go download it now.

Automatically archive all your shared links from Buffer

Wed Oct 03 00:00:00 -0700 2012

Finding links you have shared via Twitter or Facebook can be a tedious job. Of course you can save the links separately but we think there should be a better way. Few weeks ago we added automated link syncing from Twitter, Pocket and GitHub to name a few. Today we’re adding a new service to the mix: Buffer.

If you don’t know Buffer, it’s a great tool for posting timed updates to your social networks and you don’t need to worry about flooding your followers. Now you can hook up your Buffer account with Kippt Sync to save all the links you post. To set up syncing, visit Kippt Sync, activate Buffer connection and turn on the sync. You can also check out Buffer’s blog post for detailed guide.

Updates from the community - Clippt v1.1 and Klippr for Meego

Wed Sep 12 00:00:00 -0700 2012

At Kippt we love APIs and it shows in almost everything we do: our own web app and extension rely on our public API. On top of this we have integrations to probably 20 different 3rd party APIs (we literally lost count). For this reason we get really excited when we see others using Kippt’s API. Here are the latest updates from our developer community.

Clippt updated to 1.1 - New look and iPad support

Clippt is our favourite Kippt app for iOS and it has been fantastic to see Alex updating it. Version 1.1 just hit the App Store and it adds iPad support, landscape mode and new design among other things. You can read more about it here or download it from App Store.

With the new version Clippt also supports app urls and you can add a quick bookmarklet. Really handy!

Klippr for Meego

Martin Borho has been working on a Meego client, Klippr, for Nokia’s N9 and N950 devices. It’s still in beta but developing fast. He also ended up open sourcing it so you can contribute on the project at GitHub.

Dribbble shots!

There’s also designers using Kippt and it’s fascinating to see how they envision what Kippt would look like on mobile. Here are few shots from Dribbble. If you’re a developer, get in touch with these guys and helps them build these apps.

Kippt iPhone by Fabio Basile

Kippt for Windows Phone and Windows 8 by Corey Ginnivan