Any comments from the experts here?

The problem with this tagging method is when you update an application.

A related question: for PDF files, would it not be better to use the PDF keyword field (accessible via Preview) as the basis for tagging PDFs since these are embedded in the file and thus guaranteed to travel with the file across machines, operating systems etc.?

I know why my spotlight comments were being removed/lost. I was just pointing out that using spotlight comments for tagging really doesn’t work if they get lost when an application is updated.

I love the idea of tagging apps, I just wish there was a more permanent way of doing it.

I’m not an Apple engineer, but to the best of my knowledge, the Finder associates Spotlight Comments with the actual file, and not with the location of the file. Thus, when you move a file, its Spotlight Comments go with it. And that’s probably a good thing.

When you replace an existing file with another file, you are really deleting the original file and putting the new file in the same location with the same name. So because the Spotlight Comments are associated with the file, and not the location, and because you’re deleting the original and putting another in its place, the Spotlight Comments of the original file to the same place that the original file goes: they get deleted.

That’s why copying a new version of an application over an old version causes the Spotlight Comments you’d associated with the old version to go away. So yeah, that’s something to watch out for.

Hope this helps.

I have written XTagFS - a macfuse filesystem that allows you to view tags (i.e. spotlight comments) and tagged files as a file-system. In XTagFS, a tag becomes a folder which contains (alias/links to) files tagged with that tag. Files tagged with multiple tags can be accessed in any order: e.g. file tagged with tag1 and tag2 can be found at path /tag1/tag2 or tag2/tag1. Tagging/Untagging files and managing tags using file-system operations (mv, rm, etc) is planned for the next release.
You can get XTagFS from here: http://code.google.com/p/xtagfs/

Please give it a shot - I would love to have some feedback/comments!

Thanks
ip

An Application on the Mac is really just a folder named {appname}.app right? Well, what happens when you copy a newer version of that app from a DMG file? Doesn’t it replace the folder that contains the tags with the one in the DMG file that doesn’t have tags?

If I were to go into the contents of the app in the DMG and copy all the files to the app on my HD, then I would expect the tags to stay since I’m not touching the folder that represents the application.

Am I missing something here? I’m still a bit new with Mac and OS X so its certainly possible.

Thanks for everyone’s input! For further questions or support, please email us at support_bot-at-bigrobotsoftware-dot-com.

And thanks to Nick for mentioning TagBot! He’s been a great source of interest and feedback.

The accent mark issue was recently brought to our attention, and we’ve been working on fixing it for an upcoming release of TagBot.

In the meantime, you should be able to delete the accented tag from any files you’ve applied it to by right-clicking on the file in the Finder, selecting Get Info, and deleting the tag text from the Spotlight Comments field in the Get Info window.

Sorry for the inconvenience; we’ll have a free upgrade with a fix for this issue released pretty soon.

I can’t remove them with QS nor Tagbot. Now I am stuck with a few tags that have accentmarks in them. No problem to add another tag without it, but I would like to find an easy way to delete the accented ones.

My advise for the moment: avoid accentmarks in your tags!

You need to copy the script into “Script Editor” and save it as “GetTags.scpt”

In GeekTool create a new entry with the command:
osascript /Users/username/path/to/script/GetTags.scpt

Hope this helps.

We’ve had a few other people ask us about organizing and / or categorizing tags as well. It was an issue we’ve been aware of, but for version 1.0 we wanted to release it as you see it now, and to gauge user demand for the ability to organize tags.

So thanks for adding to that conversation. Pete and I still need to discuss the feature some more, and figure out if it’s a good fit with TagBot, and if so, how it should work. Feel free to email us (support_bot-at-bigrobotsoftware-dot-com) if you’d like to discuss it some more.

For anyone else tagging files with Quicksilver. I wasn’t loving the standard tag icon for the plugin, so I created some new ones. You can view, download them & get the instructions on how to change the default one for the new ones here http://docs.blacktree.com/quicksilver/creations/replacement_icons (bottom of the page)

Jono:

Sorry for the hotkey collision. We tried to find a hotkey that would be fairly collision-free, but I guess we’ve found a collision for this one. Pete and I are probably going to try to work out a good way to change the hotkey for the next release. Thanks for pointing this out.

Charlie:

I’m confused by the fact that TagBot isn’t finding emails and AddressBook entries. I’m pretty sure we’re not adding those lines you pointed out to our queries. Send me an email at ryfar-at-bigrobotsoftware-dot-com so we can discuss this further, if you don’t mind. I’d like to figure out what’s going on.

Also, I’m not sure how interoperable TagBot and MailTags are right now, but I’m going to look into it.

Chris:

I’m glad you liked TagBot and Meta enough to buy them; thanks!

Originally, Pete and I didn’t want Meta to take focus when the window was brought forward, because we wanted it to act less like a separate application and more like just a regular part of the system. But you raise a valid point about arrowing through tags. We’re going to look into the ramifications of making it take focus when being un-hidden. Thanks for bringing that up.

Cheers,

Ryan

Also with meta, it would be nice if it interfaced with quicksilver, so that you could put qs into text mode and then run the text search in meta.

One thing I noticed with TagBot is that in Mail the keyboard shortcut far adding attachments is CTRL, Shift +A (which I use all the time). So at the moment it’s not playing nicely with TagBot. Maybe we could have the option to change the hot key in the future?

Charlie you could retag your files like this:

Bring up the tag you want to change in Quicksilver & select ‘Show Files Matching Tag’ which will create a Spotlight Finder search window. (Say for example they are called @project1).

Create a tag in TagBot called project1 & drag all the files (tagged at the moment with the @ prefix) from the Spotlight Finder search window onto the TagBot ‘project1′ tag. They will now be tagged with the &project1 tag (as well as the @project1 tag).

Then select all the files again in the Spotlight Finder search window & bring them up in Quicksilver (I have a trigger to do this but if you don’t you could go) Finder Selection or Current Selection in the 1st pane, Tab, Remove Tags in the 2nd pane, Tab project1 in the 3rd pane. This will remove the @project1 tags & leave the &project1 tags intact.

Then change the tags prefix from @ to & in Quicksilver just to be on the safe side for the future.

Thanks. Good idea. I probably have a whole bunch of junk tags in there anyway so this’ll help with trimming them out.

Ryan:
I notice that email and address book entries don’t show up in the Smart folders. This is an issue with OS X: They show up in a Spotlight search but not in Smart Folders unless you manually edit the Smart Folder in a text editor.

Would it be possible to remove these lines form the query TagBot sends to the Finder:

&& (kMDItemContentType != com.apple.mail.emlx)
&& (kMDItemContentType != public.vcard)

(as detailed on MacOSXHints here)

That would be most awesome, as then TagBot will find my MailTagged mails.

I notice that your other app, Meta, finds these (mail and contacts) but the saved Meta searches won’t work with QS like regular Smart Folders will.

Thanks!

For instance, I have a Smart folder for “today”. Anything I opened already today is in there, and that one alone is a huge timesaver.

http://www.dragthing.com

This is sweetness indeed. Especially the ‘hidden’ feature you pointed out in the comments up there for ‘AND’ searching by shift clicking.

OK. I have been using the ‘@’ to perpend, and my QS tags all use this. I want to go over the ampersand now. Any idea on how to do this? I could do it manually without too much hardship, I guess, but it’ll take an age as I have 124 tags set in QS.

Still and all, TagBot looks like a keeper. I’ll give it a few days but I can see 20 bucks winging it’s way to you pretty soon.

I wouldn’t go that far, but thanks.