VoodooPad’s tagging support is extremely basic, but it’s still one of my favorite applications when it comes to collecting ideas and seeing how they interconnect. Hopefully the upcoming VoodooPad 4.0 will offer better tagging in addition to whatever else Gus Mueller has up his sleeves.

For more information, see the 1.7.2 blog post.

For full details or to download, check out the release notes.

I find it intriguing that the number of desktop frontends to subscription-driven web apps is increasing. Certainly for those people who use these web apps, a desktop companion that allows offline access (among other perks) would be fantastic, but for the vast majority of users the application is barely worth a cursory glance. Unless you have a Lighthouse account, you can’t even run Lighthouse Keeper to put it through its paces; the first thing you see when you launch it is a sheet that requires you to fill in your Lighthouse account details or quit. I think to some extent applications like this are approaching from the wrong direction: we don’t need desktop frontends to specific web apps; what we need are desktop applications with full functionality that can also tie into one or more web apps. Perhaps such functionality will make its way into Lighthouse Keeper down the road, but for now the program will only be of interest to those already using, or thinking seriously of adopting, Lighthouse.

For more information about the update, check the release notes.

For slightly more information, check out the blog announcement.

Although I haven’t had a chance to try it yet (thanks to the aforementioned trip to San Francisco), I’m really excited to finally be able to hook up Things on my computer (which I use constantly) and Things on my iPhone (which I have launched once when I downloaded it). Unfortunately, Things touch still does not support tags or areas, but Cultured Code is promising those in the near future. For more information about Things touch 1.1, see the Things touch 1.1 announcement.

For more information about the updates see the Default Folder X release notes, Together release notes, or Pukka 1.7 announcement.

Neither software offers release notes, although if you’re interested in details about the Nifty Box bug you can find those in the 1.2.1 blog announcement.

Personally, I’d just as soon take my Services menu out back and put it out of its misery, but hopefully the generically described speed improvements and bug fixes will make Leap that much more useful despite the new features not being all that exciting. For more information about Leap or to download the software, head over to the Leap homepage.

Although I haven’t played with Nifty Box much, my impressions of it are that it’s not a terribly robust system, but offers a far superior searching speed to Spotlight when it comes to file system tagging. Nifty Box is in many ways a precursor to Leap, but one with an interface more inspired by file libraries like EagleFiler or Together.

Although I haven’t played around with it much, the application itself is fairly awkward (thanks in large part to being a complex Applescript), but what’s promising about it is the place that it can play in current tagging workflows. Tag Folders provides an interesting meeting place between something like FileSpot and whatever file system tagging solution you prefer, wrapped in a familiar, Finder-like package. Definitely worth checking out for anyone trying to tag their file system.

For more details about the update, see the blog announcement.

For more details on 1.3.6 (the only release with much going on), see the blog announcement.

For more details and to download the new version, see the release notes.

Along with those minor updates, Cha-Ching 2.0 has been released as an early public beta. I haven’t tried it myself yet, but it will be interesting to see if the second version is able to fix some of the many issues that marred the first. Cha-Ching is one of those applications that I want to love, but have trouble using regularly because it just isn’t quite perfected yet.

For more information and to download, visit the MailTags release notes.

Hazel is one of those one-of-a-kind pieces of software that can be amazingly helpful if you take the time to set it up but may at first glance seem too esoteric to be worth downloading. Admittedly, I have never taken the time myself yet, but particularly if you are trying to create a file system tagging workflow Hazel could be an essential part of making sure that all your files get tagged and sorted as you create them without having to expend a lot of effort along the way. Hopefully sometime in the near future I’ll be able to play with it and provide a bit more specific advice; for now, though, you should definitely be aware of the possibilities of Hazel if you’re trying to automate your tagging tasks.

For more information, check out the official 3.1 forum announcement or download via the in-program auto-updating or the Mariner Software download page. This is definitely a worthwhile update to download.

For a detailed list, see the release notes. Definitely a good version to download for current owners of EagleFiler, but there isn’t really anything new to see here otherwise.