Tagamac

This is not a sale to miss! For the weekend of March 29th and 30th, 2008 only Leap is on sale for 50% off its list price from MacZot (ends up being about $30), and since its price is the main downside for the software I strongly recommend you check it out.

Despite my first impressions, Leap is the most exciting file system tagging app on the market and provides a great way for new users to get into tags (since it uses current folder hierarchies to supplement your tags). I’ve posted a bit more of an in-depth look at the strengths of Leap in the MacZot comments if you need more convincing. Incidentally, Leap was also updated to version 1.0.4 yesterday, but the update didn’t add much (just a couple of bug fixes).

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.

Leap, currently the most likely piece of software to entice me into file system tagging, was just updated to version 1.0.3. This minor version increase includes better memory handling for some searches (particularly “Go Deep” searches), support for the new Office 2008 file types, the ability to create folders by right clicking in the Locations panel, and a number of small bug fixes and UI improvements.

For more information, see the release notes in the program’s auto-updating, or download it for the first time from the Leap homepage.

At long last MailTags 2.2 has emerged out of beta and is ready for general consumption. MailTags 2.2 is Leopard-only, free for all registered 2.x users, and offers significant improvements over 2.1, including new support for tagging RSS feeds in Mail, tagging Mail notes, and a new extensible architecture under the hood that should allow either Indev or third parties to extend MailTags’ functionality in interesting ways.

If you’ve never tried MailTags, I highly recommend it. MailTags is one of those rare programs that can become an irreplaceable part of your workflow during its trial period, and is not to be missed for anyone for whom email is a central part of their productive workday. For more details about the 2.2 release in general, see the MailTags homepage, the general release notes, or the detailed release notes.

Code Collector Pro received a minor update to version 1.2.1 at the end of last week. This minor version increase fixed a problem where snippets that weren’t set to be shared were posted on CodeCollector.net along with a couple of other bug fixes and a new “Add snippet from clipboard” toolbar button.

For more information, see the 1.2.1 blog announcement or the release notes.

Yep, the file library for people with huge collections of PDFs, was updated yesterday to version 1.7.7. This minor update includes better Leap – Yep integration, a memory problem on Leopard when scrolling through large thumbnails, new backward and forward keys (‘[' and ']‘ respectively), a new “interleave” feature when combining PDFs, and “a few other fixes” (according to MacUpdate).

To download the latest version, you can use Yep’s auto-updating or download it from the Yep website.

Things, the beautiful tag-based task manager that I’ve mooned over before, has been updated to version 0.9 (beta). This version adds recurring tasks, the ability to choose your Things library location (just hold down option while launching Things), hierarchical tags in the tag drop-down menu, and numerous welcome bug fixes and performance enhancements.

I can’t recommend Things highly enough. I’ve been using it since shortly before I recorded the screencast in November, and my opinion has only improved. Things is simply the easiest, most flexible solution to task management that I’ve found, I have a lot of respect for the developers’ creative vision, and the burgeoning Things community is great. For more information about the 0.9 release, see the blog posts on recurring tasks and the 0.9 release announcement or the release notes. Things is, as always, free to use until its release, and I’ve found it to be extremely stable. Bugs tend to be cosmetic rather than data-threatening.

Thanks to a tip from a reader, I just discovered Evernote 3.0 beta, a web service for storing notes, images, and clippings with clients for Mac, Windows, and mobile phones alike. The screencast featuring the Mac client makes it look very, very cool, and with tagging support and super easy searching and tag-based filtering, this looks like it may be a strong competitor with more traditional desktop-only file libraries in some respects.

I’ve sent some questions to the Evernote press people, and if they’re willing I’ll try and get a preview of the Mac client up here on Tagamac in the near future. Just seeing the screencast, I’m really excited about the possibilities Evernote seems to offer.

Code Collector Pro, the tag-based snippets organizer, has been updated to version 1.2, and along with this version the developer has released CodeCollector.net, an online service that allows you to share and sync your favorite code snippets with others (for free!). This version also reintroduces a free “lite” version of the program that doesn’t offer tagging or a number of other advanced features. As of version 1.2, Code Collector Pro now allows you to lock individual snippets to prevent editing, adds drag and drop support to other apps, and introduces some new interface elements to make sorting and using your snippets easier.

For more details, please see the 1.2 blog announcement, Code Collector Pro release notes, and of course CodeCollector.net. Code Collector Pro costs €20 to register. Although the tagging interface in Code Collector Pro is a little bit clunky (you have to use an Inspector-style window to adjust the metadata for any given snippet), this is still an exciting application for anyone who needs to keep track of common code snippets or share them with others.

EagleFiler, my personal favorite file library, has been updated to version 1.3. This is a pretty hefty update with a slew of bug fixes and minor new features. Some highlights: you can now “capture with options”, allowing you to set a variety of metadata when you capture something (instead of forcing you to go back over everything after the fact); Quick Look is now used to display files that EagleFiler doesn’t understand (in OS 10.5 only, of course); an Untagged folder has been added to the Source List (hallelujah!); EagleFiler can now capture from Address Book, Flock, Pages, OmniGraffle, and others (and has improved capture in several applications); and a bunch of other stuff like improved speed/efficiency, less RAM use for large libraries, better Applescript, more frequent checks on the To Import folder, and much, much more.

For the full release notes and a direct link to the download, see the EagleFiler 1.3 blog announcement. This is definitely a worthy version bump to an application that’s already great, and I highly recommend downloading it soon if you’re using EagleFiler.