Tagamac

For those software developers amongst us, you may be interested to note that M Cubed Software has released Lighthouse Keeper 1.0. Similar to PackRat, Lighthouse Keeper is little more than a desktop frontend to an existing web application, in this case the issue tracker Lighthouse. Lighthouse Keeper offers the ability to manage your Lighthouse projects without needing a site-specific browser or similar solution, as well as adding offline access to your Lighthouse-tracked issues and the ability to quickly add an issue with a system-wide hotkey. And, of course, tagging is a primary organizational offering of Lighthouse Keeper. Lighthouse Keeper is available as a free demo with a registration fee of €30.

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.

A freeware utility called Tag Folders was released today. Tag Folders, which is essentially a complex Applescript bundled as an application, allows you to create smart folders that apply tags to files that you drop on them based on their rules. So for instance, if you have a “work” tag folder and you drop a file on it, that file gets tagged with “work”. Open the folder, and you’ll find the file you just tagged (along with any others tagged “work”). Tag Folders works with all of the major tagging solutions (including Leap, Punakea, TagBot, and the Quicksilver tagging plugin), and offers a Finder-centric way to both assign and find tagged files.

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 those Yojimbo users out there, you may be interested to hear that Steven Huey just released Yojimbo Tag Cleanup, a simple application (essentially a collection of Applescript commands and command-line searches with a GUI) intended to help you locate the tags in Yojimbo that you are no longer using. It’s all too easy with tagging software to lose track of which tags are useful citizens and which are cruft that has hung around past its prime. With the artfully named Yojimbo Tag Cleanup, finding abandoned tags in Yojimbo should be much simpler.

On a somewhat related tangent, one of the features that I would love to see in tagging software would be simple statistics tracking. When using tags, the most useful information you can have is how much attention you give to a certain tag. How often you’ve used it versus how often you’ve browsed or searched for it, for instance. Being able to see explicitly what attention you give tags can make optimizing a tagging system extremely easy and save you a lot of unnecessary tagging that you may do out of habit. Yojimbo Tag Cleanup is a simple step in the right direction in this regard; it’s a shame that there aren’t any easy ways for third parties to help you identify other aspects of your tagging habits.

It really is a leap day: Leap, the pseudo-file system tagging software that I asked a few questions about back in October, has at last been released. Leap is billed as an alternative Finder, and provides tagging, Spotlight searching, and more for your files. Unfortunately, it isn’t a true file system tagging solution; Leap’s tags are stored in its database, so you’ll have to use have Leap running to tag and browse your files (rather than being able to tag in the file system) (Update: a reader brought to my attention that there’s a lot more than meets to eye to Leap, so I took a second look). If file libraries are too restrictive for you and Spotlight comments tagging inadequate, then Leap may well be a useful middle ground.

Unfortunately, it costs $60 to register (or a discounted price for Yep owners). Given its comparatively high price (file libraries hover around $40, Punakea is free, and TagBot is $20) and the drawbacks of being not quite one thing and not quite another, Leap will likely be a fairly niche product. However, if you’re not happy with the available file system tagging options, Leap is well worth a trial.

Gene Smith, a consultant specializing in information architecture, just published Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web. Although the book appears to focus primarily on how to design a collaborative tagging system online, it may well be of interest if you just want to know more about the current thoughts on tagging as a social phenomenon.

I’ve ordered my copy and will post more about it when it arrives. For more information about the book, check out the Tagging companion website. The book is currently for sale through Amazon.com (I’m not sure whether or not you can find it in brick and mortar stores).

Mariner Software today released StoryMill 3.0 at MacWorld. StoryMill (previously called Avenir) adds a new timeline view for tracking scenes in chronological time as well as narrative order, provides vastly improved customizable export templates for exporting text from anywhere in the project, integrates scene text and chapter text, and like Avenir before it still uses tags and smart views for powerful and simple organization. If you are a writer, I strongly recommend StoryMill; although its structure is most conducive for fiction and creative non-fiction, it is an excellent piece of software and provides powerful features that can help with any writing project (not to mention that as of its release, no other creative writing software on the market for Mac has anything like its timeline view). StoryMill is available as a download version for $44.95, and owners of Avenir can upgrade for $14.95. A boxed version is forthcoming, and will cost $49.95.

In related news, if you’ve been wondering why there haven’t been many updates to Tagamac over the last week or two, feel free to blame StoryMill; I was contracted by Mariner to write the all-new documentation for the program and as the deadline approached it ate up the free time that would otherwise have gone towards a new article or two. (Plus there weren’t any tagging software updates, so I haven’t had any news to post.) Now that sweet freedom beckons, however, I’m hoping to bring you some more articles on tagging to start the year off right and help you meet that New Year’s resolution to tag more. You made that resolution, right?

For those hardy souls who want to try every single Getting Things Done application available for Mac, the alpha version of iGTD 2 is now available for download. Please note that the iGTD 2 alpha is Leopard only. Additionally, as alpha software, it is likely not feature complete and is probably rife with bugs (already there’s been reports of problems with changing the sort order in the task tab). This is an excellent chance to try out all the alternatives before OmniFocus’s half-price sale ends, but I doubt you’ll want to use iGTD 2 for actual work yet.

Personally, I’m really excited to be able to try iGTD 2 out next to Things to see how two different developers implemented a similar idea. I had mixed feelings about iGTD 1, but given how much I’m enjoying Things, I suspect that iGTD 2’s interface changes and general approach to tasks will make it a much more compelling task management app.

This has nothing to do with tagging. However, for anyone out there who does web design and needs a text editor, skEdit version 4 has finally been released. skEdit is one of the best text editors available for Mac (along with TextMate), particularly for internet text editing. Its inline code completion and project-based editing (of local and remote files simultaneously, keeping them in sync) make it a very compelling text editor, particularly given its lower price point.

Although TextMate is a more powerful editor in some ways, skEdit’s learning curve is far shallower, and if you are editing HTML, PHP, CSS, and so forth then skEdit is an excellent choice. Definitely worth taking a look now that version 4 has finally gone live.

St. Clair Software released Default Folder X 4 today, the next incarnation of the venerable Mac utility. Default Folder X has enhanced the default Mac open and save windows for years, and version 4 is another solid step forward, poviding a new HUD-style interface, support for Quicklook in Open dialogs, Leopard improvements, support for TagBot, improvements to Spotlight comment auto-completion, and much more. Default Folder X is a great utility for anyone who wants a better workflow when saving and opening files, and is an indispensable tool for people rolling their own tagging solution because it allows you to edit a file’s Spotlight comments while you are saving it.

Given the number of excellent enhancements in version 4, Default Folder X is definitely worth checking out. For those who purchased Default Folder X after June 1, 2007, version 4 is a free upgrade. For everyone else it costs $34.95 new or $14.95 upgrade (and for those true old-skoolers who used the Classic version of Default Folder, you can snag it for $19.95). If you’d like to see the full list of changes and improvements, see the Default Folder X Change History.

Bookdog, a bookmarks manager for Mac, has been updated to version 5, an update that includes not only a simplified interface but also del.icio.us support and support for tags. The software has been released as beta software due to the extensive changes that have gone into it, but because it fixes several Leopard problems and is just generally more powerful, Sheep Systems recommends that all users upgrade. For more information, see the Bookdog release notes.

Bookdog is probably the most feature-rich bookmarks manager available, but its interface (while simplified and definitely better than version 4) is still very complex and not at all visually appealing. You have to make an effort to learn to use Bookdog, although you will be rewarded by being able to sync a lot more information across your browsers than other solutions provide. It’s pretty unfortunate, but despite its power Bookdog still feels somewhat like an OS 9 application.