Kiveo 1.3: Woodbine: Reading Intentions, Capturing Quotes With Your Camera

Kiveo 1.3 brings intentions, re-read tracking, quote capture with your camera, and a quieter way to mark a finished book.

David

Questions about anything below? Write to [email protected] — we’ll answer in the same plain English.

Woodbine is a climbing honeysuckle. It doesn’t grow straight up: tt twines, winding around the same stem again and again, passing back over ground it has already covered on its way toward more light.

Kiveo 1.3 comes with a handful of features that have been long overdue and sets the foundation for many exciting things to come down the road.

Here’s what’s in it.

Reading Intentions

If you want to read twenty-four books this year, you can now tell Kiveo that.

Intentions are opt-in. You choose from a small set of presets and set your intention with just a few taps. There’s nothing to check off afterward, nothing to update, and no separate place to log against.
Kiveo works out where you are from the reading you were already recording.

You can hold up to five at a time. If one stops making sense, you let it go: one confirmation, and nothing that treats it as a failure. And if you set out to read twenty-four books but put one down at page ninety, that book doesn’t count toward the twenty-four, while the ninety pages and the hours you spent with them still count toward everything else.

If you’d rather not have intentions at all, dismiss the card on your home screen, and it won’t come back. They’ll be waiting in Settings if you change your mind.

Reading a book again

Some books you finish once. Others you return to every few years, and each time the book is the same and you aren’t.

Until now, Kiveo kept one record per book, which meant reading something again asked you to make an awkward choice about the first time. That’s fixed. Choose “Read again” from the menu on any finished book, or simply move a finished book back to your current reading, and we’ll ask whether this is a fresh start or whether you’re still working through the first pass.

Each reading now keeps its own dates, its own sessions, and its own progress. Your quotes and reflections stay attached to the book itself, so what you underlined the first time sits alongside what stopped you the second. Once a book has two finishes behind it, you will see a small count attached to the book.

A re-read doesn’t add to the number of books you’ve finished. That number stays anchored to the first time you got to the last page. The pages and the hours do count, every time, because you read them every time.

Finished books can also go back on your Nightstand now, waiting their turn like anything else.

Quotes, off the page

Copying a passage by hand is a fine thing to do and a slow thing to do, and slowness is usually the point. But sometimes you just want the line.

Point your camera at the page and select the words the way you’d select text anywhere else on your phone. Kiveo saves what you picked, attached to the book.

Finishing a book is worth a moment

So is finishing a long session, or arriving at the end of an intention you set months ago.

All three now lead to the same quiet screen. It marks what happened and gets out of the way. There’s no rating to give, no number to beat, nothing to share unless you want to. When finishing a book, you now have the option to add a final reflection to it.

And The Rest…

There’s more in this release than the four things above: a new theme for sharing cards, a reworked onboarding, a tidier Settings screen, and a handful of fixes for problems. All of it is in the release log.

Woodbine is out today. Kiveo is free on the App Store, and as always, we’d rather hear from you than not: [email protected].

— A Note

We went back and forth on what to call these. Everything in the obvious vocabulary carried the wrong weight, and most of it implied someone keeping score. “Intention” was the only word that described setting out to do something without also describing failing at it.

— A Note

This is the shape we wanted for Kiveo — the line, the book it came from, and no one performing in the margins. No public reviews, no stars.