Comments on: TagBot 1.01 Released

By: Mel

Mel — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 14:34:32 +0000

An open source freeware app you may want to look into is Spotmeta. It allows you to tag, create smart folders based on tags, add due dates to files and more. I tried Punkea but really didn’t like all the extraneous markup it added to the spotlight comments field.

An example of using due dates he gives is, tag your files with due dates and then create a smart folder showing due dates within 1 week. You’ll then have a constantly updating folder of all your upcoming work. I have Tracks installed for GTD and couldn’t see how this would useful to me but now I’m thinking I could tag all the related files to a project so I can access them all in the same place. I can still use a to do list to know what to do and then go to the due date tagged folder to find all the relevant files.

Now, if I can just get disciplined enough to do it. My problem is shared by many that try and make the move to Metadata, I’m so used to folders that I can’t shake the habit. I organize using folders then tag thereby doubling the workload.

Tagbot looks like it will evolve into a useful program but $20 for a one trick is a little steep. Coming from the PC world where each program costs $100 and does 20 things not very well, I was pleasantly surprised at the Mac approach of lots of smaller, cheaper programs that do one thing and do it well. I was even more spoiled when I saw the quality of the freeware and donation ware for the Mac.

I know some people can program in the evenings as a hobby and offer products for free and others need to make money and buy food and keep the kids warm but, you can’t make it all in one go. I would be interested to see the volume of sales compared to now if the price was between $9 and $12. You guys are continuing the tradition of one app, one task and making that app work really well, I hope it works out for you but I really do think you need to revisit the pricing.

Usual disclaimer, I have no affiliations with any of the products I mention except I use them.

http://www.fluffy.co.uk/spotmeta

By: Guthrie

Guthrie — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 18:14:15 +0000

I was thinking about trying this out as I make the plunge to Metadata instead of depending on folders and proprietary PIMs. I’d like to increase my Quicksilver-Fu and follow the method described in the awesome series of Apple Blog posts, but this does seem to make some of the work easier. As I discovered after a response earlier on, Punakea leaves an awful lot of ugly commenting in the spotlight comments field.

By: Phil Bowell

Phil Bowell — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 17:57:01 +0000

I like the way TagBot can now take the focus when the window is invoked, but one thing I expected that didn’t happen was that I couldn’t just press enter on a tag and see a smart folder open containing those tags. I think that would be useful and a logical behaviour. Each little change is certainly tempting me to make a purchase, I just need to sort my tagging workflow out to make it more natural and drop the hierarchy!

By: Eamon Ford

Eamon Ford — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 17:37:07 +0000

TagBot is pretty nice, but if you don't want to pay for something, Punakea is also pretty cool. It's still in Beta, so it's very buggy as of now, but it looks like it will be a very nice little app.

By: Ryan Perry

Ryan Perry — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 16:57:23 +0000

Hi, this is Ryan from Big Robot.

I’m glad that the new release is filling in some gaps for you. We’re definitely listening to users’ requests and trying to figure out how best to implement them. So thanks for the feedback.

With regard to TagBot popping back up when it isn’t running and you right-click something, Daniel H is correct. All of the tagging logic, including the list of tags, lives in TagBot.app; the Contextual Menu Plugin we use to enable tagging from the Finder’s contextual menu just communicates with TagBot.app to do everything. So when you right-click something and activate our plugin, it has to activate TagBot to get the list of tags, etc.

If you really don’t want TagBot.app to run every time you right-click something, you can just remove TagBot.plugin from /Library/Contextual Menu Items. But a side-effect will be that you don’t be able to use TagBot’s tagging capabilities from the Finder at all anymore until you reinstall the plugin.

Hope this helps. If you have more questions about this issue, feel free to email us at support_bot-at-bigrobotsoftware-dot-com.

Cheers!

By: Daniel H

Daniel H — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 16:45:43 +0000

@Jono: Yeah, that happened with me. I imagine it has to do with the fact that it’s installed/registered as a Finder contextual menu plugin, so whenever you click to bring up the contexual menus it calls for TagBot.

By: Jono

Jono — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 15:18:51 +0000

I’d have prefered to specify my own hotkey, but it’s good now you can change it so that it doesn’t clash with Mail> Add Attachment :)

At the moment it seems a little pricey for what it does (bearing in mind that there’s a few things out there at the moment that will do similar things for free). Having said that though if more features are added like:

‘Add New Tag’ option (as well as selecting from existing tags) in the context menu.
Specify tag prefix.
Drag a tag off the tagging window to create a smart folder on the desktop (as well as the right clicking on the tag option).
Organising &/or categorising tags.

If a future version did these things then I’d definitely pony up the cash & buy it.

(I have slight bug with it that’s still in the new version. If I’ve quit TagBot/don’t have it running & right click on the desktop it will start the app. Does anyone else find this?)