Tagamac

Yesterday was a big day for tagging; aside from the release of Tags, Ironic Software officially released OpenMeta, their new open source framework for tagging miscellaneous files using extended attributes (xattr) on Mac OS X 10.5. In addition to the OpenMeta code itself, they also released Tagger—a free utility for tagging, rating, or finding files using OpenMeta—and OMTool—a command lined utility for working with OpenMeta metadata. Both utilities are available for download from the Ironic Software homepage.

The exciting part about OpenMeta is that developers finally have a standardized way to assign and read tags on files (other than the less-than-ideal Spotlight comment hack of yore) which has the potential to free users from getting tied down to a particular solution. Aside from Tags and Deep (the first of which is compatible with OpenMeta, the second of which was the first program to use it), MailTags is also in the process of joining the OpenMeta bandwagon (not available in public builds yet, unfortunately). Hopefully software like Together, EagleFiler, and others of that ilk will also begin to incorporate OpenMeta, allowing users to tag and find files across the system and their various tagging programs without needing to keep all of those programs running.

Although not strictly tagging software, Quicksilver, one of the two best application launchers and all-around Mac enhancements (the other being LaunchBar), has been released as open sourced software to the general community. Although the developer has been promising this for quite some time, that it’s actually been accomplished is quite exciting; hopefully some talented programmer with lots of time on their hands will pick up the project and provide a much-need bug fix and overall revamp. Quicksilver is a beautiful piece of software, and one of the staples in many peoples’ do-it-yourself file system tagging systems.

If you yourself are interested in taking a peek at the source code, it is freely available from the BlackTree Google Code site. The current BlackTree release of Quicksilver remains a beta, although it has been updated for 10.5.