Why Apple's "Tags" will change the way we organize files

[MIDI Life Crisis]

I think they used Maverick because it's so different. Too bad we can't make political references here...

my mind is a raging torrent flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives...

[frankf]

I use the Mail extension Mailtags and the tag concept has made email organization much easier. I'm very interested to see how tags are integrated into OSX. Finder comments are great for, well, comments, but the ability to create, choose from existing tags and search for tags in the finder would be great. Mailtags allows for sub groups, so you can have a Group "Projects" and another "MOTU-Mac" and tagged subgroups within.


Frank Ferrucci

[stubbsonic]

I think they used Maverick because it's so different. Too bad we can't make political references here...

my mind is a raging torrent flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives...

If "Maverick" is the beginning of a series, we might expect to see:

Xi ("Chi"): Rebel
XII: Revolution
XIII: Renegade
XIV (Zhiv): Different Drum

But hopefully at some point, our culture will grow so tired of this style of branding that it will just ignore what the company calls it and give it a more entertaining name like "code wad" or "boobs".

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Ha ha ha!!! Nice.

[mikehalloran]

Is Mavericks really the name of the OS? Are they embarking on a new naming system involving sports teams? I really despise that.

Nope. Mavericks is the surfing contest off the San Mateo coast that happens almost every year when conditions are right. As announced on Monday, future OS names will be named after features unique to California. It has already been leaked that "Yosemite" is being worked on already (didn't they use that for an old build of the Mac portable?). We have a long way to go before they reach "Death Valley" or "Barstow".

[James Steele]

Yeah. Wasn't Yosemite a motherboard or something? I remember so was Sawtooth. Apple definitely does some unconventional naming.

[Shooshie]

Is Mavericks really the name of the OS? Are they embarking on a new naming system involving sports teams? I really despise that. Other than Baseball, I'm a nonfat of team sports. Not that it matters what I am; but surely they're not going to name their operating systems after sports teams. Why not String Quartets? Rock Bands? (well, that one is obvious; getting the rights would be a nightmare) But basketball teams? I'm seriously disappointed in Apple.

It's a beach isn't it?

Beaches would make good names. Mountains, rivers, Tourist sites… Anything else!

As for Finder tags -- color labels -- it's all a matter of how you use them. Sure, you can't assign more than one to a file, but they're not metatags in the strict sense of the word. They're still tags, and you can search by them. You can organize the Finder by them. Sort by color. In function, they're a very limited form of tags, and they've always been with us. Well, at least since about MacOS 2.0. Oh… it was called System 2 back then.

I'm just glad they are finally giving us full metatag capability in the whole OS. That's been a serious drawback of the Finder and how the Mac works in general. You have always been able to store comments about a file, but those disappear if you sneeze. I've never seen comments that made it through a system upgrade, or if I have, I don't remember it, because I've tried to use Comments as a sort of meta-tag system. Didn't work.

Tags = welcome and long needed addition to the OS. Even if it's just an expansion of what's already there.

Well, well; I just figured out that Mavericks is a BEACH! So when Bayswater said "Life's a beach," I guess he knew the inside joke. It's a beach near San Francisco which is a favorite for surfers. Ok, that makes it a lot, lot better. I live in a town where everybody is hung up on sports teams, and it just gets sickening after a while. I mean, they're disgustingly hung up on the local teams. Mavericks is one of them. To have it come right into the computer that I use was really a sickening thought. But now that I know it's a beach, I'm much happier about it. Not that anyone cares a diddly-squat what bothers me or what I like. But there; I said it. Now I can forget it.

Shooshie

[bayswater]

Well, well; I just figured out that Mavericks is a BEACH! So when Bayswater said "Life's a beach," I guess he knew the inside joke.
Shooshie

Sorry, I didn't realize it was a joke until I looked at it later. I read about the beaches somewhere on one of the links posted above.

They've used at least one beach before -- Bondi.

[Shooshie]

Well, well; I just figured out that Mavericks is a BEACH! So when Bayswater said "Life's a beach," I guess he knew the inside joke.
Shooshie

Sorry, I didn't realize it was a joke until I looked at it later. I read about the beaches somewhere on one of the links posted above.

They've used at least one beach before -- Bondi.

And don't forget the Pismo Powerbook. It's still my favorite Powerbook as goes design, and I still have mine. I think it's about 14 or 15 years old now. In its day it was a real flier.

[starks]

This is an idea I first considered about 8 years ago, and even wrote up an essay on it, I believe I may have even passed it on to Apple. It's an old concept, a simple one, but infinitely effective. The idea is to put keyword tags on every file that's created. And instead of organizing files hierarchically, files are organized non-linearly and called up souly by keyword searches. It may sound like a recipe for disaster, but if implemented correctly, could be actually fairly similar to how we organize files today, but a lot more powerful. One simply has to transplant the current system over. Instead of creating folders, we create keyword macros, maybe even these keywords can be organized hierarchically in a very similar manner that folders are today. The difference is that the file actually lives in one giant library, sort of like a song in iTunes. The benefit is that hierarchical systems, while great for many things, can break down in cases where there is need for intense cross-referencing. If you still want to organize keywords hierarchically, that's a good way of going, except there's nothing stopping you from having duplicates of keywords in other categories, where-as creating endless amounts of file aliases and shortcuts becomes tedious. You may not even notice, at first, that there is a difference from the traditional hierarchical system, except that it's far more flexible and much faster to navigate.

If we know the exact location of the file, we can find it quickly in traditional hierarchical system.
If the related files are in different folders, we need to browser different folders to find them separately.
We can also use search function to find them, but the result are flat list.
Use tagging to organize files, we can find them flexibly and gradually.
Mihand has both properties of tagging and hierarchical systems, and it organizes files and folders flexibly using tags in Dropbox.
Maybe you could try it!

[artfarm1]

Like someone once said (George Carlin?)......"We have way too many lawyers. So they make up work for themselves in order to justify their existence. And we get a society full of silly and needless laws" (or a quote something like this.)

Sometime it seems like some big software companies have way too many software designers trying to change things just for 'change-sake' or just in order to justify their existence.

Like many others, I love Apple computers and gadgets and was thrilled and amazed at Apple's offering since they came out with OSX Jaguar way back when... but I seem to dislike Apple software more and more. Especially when it comes to the interests and needs of the professional market, and for the needs and interests of any people who really use and rely on their computers for daily usage besides the razzle-dazzle of 'social media' or having the ability to publish your latest 'opus' of loops or iphone 'major filmaking'.

For example, in the last year, I've personally left iMovie 11 and 6 for Adobe Elements, left Logic in order to come back to DP, left Pages to get back to Microsoft Word, left Safari for Firefox or another browser, left Time Machine for Carbon Copy Cloner, and a few other examples.

It's a changed company.... not for the better in my opinion.

Change just for change sake and to have something to explain each quarter to the stockholders. What a drag..... kind of a sad look at the way we do things!

[bayswater]

Well as I understand it apple didn't come up with tags. They've been around for a long time and the people advocating them have been after apple to support them as an extension to traditional file systems. It's just another thing you don't have to use. Like custom consoles and the drum editor. They don't do any harm.

[toodamnhip]

Sometime it seems like some big software companies have way too many software designers trying to change things just for 'change-sake' or just in order to justify their existence.
... but I seem to dislike Apple software more and more. Especially when it comes to the interests and needs of the professional market.

I think this change is coming from where the HUGE sales are, the iphone and dummy app tablet world.

I like the idea of Tags, but when i read your comment, I really thought of how the iphone OS is influencing the Main “Pro" OS.
Professionals bother to learn things, iphone users are a finicky bunch. In some ways, especially sociological ways pertaining to social interaction and sending photos, or texting a boyfriend, a user might learn the most extraordinary depths of an app. In other way,s the masses are completely illiterate when it comes to computers. Thus Apple starts to dummy down the OS to try to do everything FOR the user.
This is where pro users will get pissed, when the computer tried to think FOR us.
Right now we all know how to get into the “library” of the OS to repair and tweek things. Remember when OSx 1st came out? How there were “Libraries” EVERYWHERE. It was like, “what the hell is this”?....Pro users figured out all the folders in Library and more.

Well, the rest of the iphone world probably is NOT like that. They know little about the guts of their phones/computers. And so, access to those guts is diminishing slowly. And I think The iphone /ipad will seriously begin to change our current OS.

If you look at how STUPID Logic looks. It is an example of Apple dummying down Logic to match Garage Band...lol
Ridiculous!!
I have some big friends with BIG hits that use logic and feel for them...lol It looks like a crayola set.
But that very well may be how OS x goes forward.... until it is all cartoon handles, with fewer options because “users don’t need them, apple has handled that for us”...
Want a reverb, here are your choices from “Apple”.
Reverb 1-2-3. "Big and small. Shinny and dull."
Yikes! Let’s hope not.

[mikehalloran]

Well that is an interesting rant. GarageBand is a crippled version of Logic, not the other way around.

I've no use for Logic other than to export files for use in DP. It's a tool. But I don't put down those who bring me projects in GB and L to mix and master. No, I take their money and go to work.

You feel for you friends who have had big hits using Logic? Is it possible to be more condescending? Who in the world made you the arbiter of what tools others should use? It's a free country last time I checked.

This from a person still running OS 10.6? I'm glad that still works for you but I couldn't do my work with something that antiquated and slow. But you aren't me. I'm fine with that.

[jweisbin]

We use metatags to catalog our audio assets, of which we have tens of thousands of files. We have custom programs that convert AIF's to Apple Lossless format, which can be tagged. The program automatically adds some tags based on what folder the file is dropped onto. We have another custom program for playing, viewing (sorting, searching, etc), and tagging, and we add tags as needed. Without this it would be almost impossible to find anything, because the name alone simply cannot be descriptive enough, and going through thousands of files and auditioning them is not practical. We need to know many things about the piece, such as: who it was written for? who by? was it sold or not? what kind of music is it? And this can get very granular, such as "orchestral, slow, some cellos, good for car commercials..." etc.

Our system is still evolving, and the biggest hurdle we face is in developing a set of descriptive tags that works, which is difficult for music. I'm sure Pandora and other similar services have their own proprietary system and I would love to know more about it, but that will probably never happen.

If someone could develop a meta-descriptive language for music that really worked, it would revolutionize this industry. An example that comes to mind is how patches are named in VI's. Most of the time they seem totally arbitrary and even silly, and don't help at all in identifying what they really sound like.