AND, more importantly, the ability to use those tags quickly. iPhoto’s approach of clicking on 2 or more tags in the keyword list instantly segregates your photos by the criteria, and can be either AND or OR (set in preferences, not so intuitive).

I want this functionality in collecting notes. I juggle many tasks concurrently, on multiple relatede topics, and a hierarchical filing system just does not cut it, as I end up needing the information filed under multiple topics, and even conditional joins of those topics.

Notae is the only note taking app I have found that uses tags, but entry is good, and usage is poor. I have even tried Supernotecard, Avenir, and Scrivner, all writing apps that support keyword tagging, and they get closer, but are not optimized to managing action items… close but no cigar.

All the GTD stuff is seriously process constrained, and non-tag friendly, except on a single tag approach - not any better than a hierarchy.

I have run dozens of applications looking for this, and can’t believe that nothing out there is available to do this, even with all the power of OS X Spotlight (no, I don’t want seperate files for each note, and use the file system as a database - arrghh!)

Suggestions? kirk@kpj2.com

I also grabbed a demo of Hazel. I haven’t had an chance to try everything, but it looks like it has some potential. http://www.noodlesoft.com/hazel.html

This script does what you’re asking for:

on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving these_items
repeat with i from 1 to number of items in these_items
set this_item to item i of these_items
tell application “Finder” to open information window of this_item
end repeat
end adding folder items to

However, I’m left wondering about a few points that make it a little difficult to relate your article to my own intended usage. In short, just what are you organizing? That is, how many files are in your documents folder? and what sort of files are they? It seems like these two points are really key to whether tags can replace folders for any specific person.

Further, I’m interested in what your file names are like. By keeping everything in your Documents folder, it seems like you’d have a much greater issue with names clashing, which suggests long file names as a solution. That could lead to, in effect, sloppily encoding a folder structure into the file names. Have you noticed anything like that?

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/23401

Something like this could work for me. Only thing is when you open get info window on a file, the comments section looks something like this

###begin_tags###@tickets;@christina;@concert;###end_tags###

Kinda creepy

If not (if stored in an index file), then I can’t see myself backing up the metadata index each time I want to backup my “Documents” directory.

So this solution might be great now, but if a computer crash were to occur and I needed to restore my files, I would be furious to find out NOTHING is organized anymore.