Tagamac

Evernote, the access-anywhere application for storing notes and images, is now an open beta (no more needing to be invited!). Among other changes, this release also finally reveals the Evernote revenue plan: there are now free and premium accounts. Although both accounts can store as much stuff online as you want, the free account only lets you upload 40 megabytes a month while the $5/month premium account allows you to upload 500 megabytes a month (along with a few other perks).

Evernote is very cool, and well worth checking out. Although I’ve been slightly underwhelmed with the Mac client (hopefully I’ll get a preview/review up here soon, although it’s been on the burner for months) the service has a lot to recommend it (for details see the Evernote website or the numerous places around the web where people have been lavishing praise on the service). For details about the recent public beta release, check out the Evernote blog post on the topic.

MarsEdit, my favorite blogging aid, has been updated to version 2.1.4. This minor update doesn’t add any big new features, but provides a Dock menu item for starting a new post, support for uploading to a specific Picasa album for Blogger users, preventing the preview window from loading an arbitrary URL if you dragged it onto it, a fixed display of tags in the main window preview, and a safeguard against crashing on bad URLs.

For more details see the 2.1.4 blog announcement.

MarsEdit, the excellent blogging desktop client, has been updated to version 2.1.3. This minor version increase brings better draft status detection to the recently released WordPress 2.5 and Blogger, adds support for viewing a post’s tags in the preview template, ceases to escape characters in URLs inserted via macros, and includes a number of other minor fixes.

For details, see the MarsEdit 2.1.3 blog announcement. I highly recommend MarsEdit; as long as you’re comfortable with basic HTML, it vastly reduces the effort necessary to keep a blog up to date and the developer is very responsive and friendly.

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.

PackRat has been updated yet again to version 1.6. This version fixes a couple of synching problems with the Backpack API as well as adding a preference for using an SSL connection (instead of having PackRat try to figure out whether it should use SSL on synching).

For more details, see the PackRat 1.6 blog post.

PackRat has been updated to version 1.5.4. This minor update fixes the outstanding problems with Backpack whose recent big update to include multi-user support broke the API and caused a bunch of problems for PackRat.

For more info about the update, see the 1.5.4 blog announcement.

MarsEdit, the streamlined desktop blog editor that recently integrated tagging, has been updated to version 2.1.1. This minor update includes a critical bugfix for 10.4 users who wanted to use tags, works around a conflict with the WriteRoom plugin, and fixes a preview problem that occurred when placeholder tags were inside HTML attributes.

For more details, see the 2.1.1 blog announcement.

MarsEdit, the excellent desktop blog editing software from Red Sweater Software, was updated to version 2.1 this morning, an update particularly exciting because one of the major new features is a true tagging interface for blogs running WordPress or MovableType. Although WordPress bloggers could in the past use the keywords field to tag their posts, MarsEdit now features a standard token-based tag field and remembers tags you’ve entered in the past in order to provide auto-completion. 2.1 also introduces the ability to search locally stored blog posts, and includes the ability, flawed though it may be thanks WordPress and MovableType’s issues, to save drafts to the server instead of just to your local machine.

The update is available via the in-program auto-updating or from the MarsEdit homepage. For more information, see the 2.1 blog announcement or the release notes.

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).