1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
|
Tagging is all the rage on the web, but does it translate to desktop apps? Mozilla thinks so, they're building support for tags into Thunderbird 2.0. But the [Mac-only app Punakea][1] aims to take that a bit farther and apply the tagging metaphor to all your files. Punakea is currently available as a free public beta.
Punakea works by injecting its tag data into the spotlight comments metadata field in the Finder. Punakea runs as a standalone app and there's a preference setting to auto-start it on launch, so if you do fall in love with it, it'll always be there.
To see what Punakea is doing to your files, tag something and then use the "Get Info" command in the Finder. You'll see something like the screenshot to the left. My only gripe with this method of creating tags is that I sometimes search using spotlight to find files that have "#" in them since, on my machine that's going to bring up all my programming files. Punakea hoses that technique, but to be honest it wasn't a very good search in the first place, still it's something to think about.
To use Punakea you can either drag your files into the main application window or you can use a sidebar that hides off screen. Dragging a files to that edge brings up the drop zone and a list of existing tags. To apply tags to your files, all you need to do is type the tag name and hit return. There doesn't appear to be a limit on the number of tags you can apply to any individual file, though I imagine there probably is an upper limit to the string length of Spotlight comments. If so it's high enough that most people probably won't need to worry about it.
Once you have your files tagged, Punakea displays everybody's favorite search mechanism -- a tag cloud. Click a tag and all the tagged files come up, the tag cloud also then narrows to show only tags from files returned in your search. This allows you to zero in on specific tags and refine your search down until you get the file you were looking for.
The search results window mirrors the look and structure of the spotlight search results window and groups files by type. However, unlike Spotlight there didn't appear to be any way to filter by date, kind, location or any of the other spotlight filters.
The other major shortcoming of Punakea is that its bookmark support is limited to Safari. In Safari it's easy to add a bookmark to Punakea by dragging the site's favicon to the sidebar and dropping it on the hotspot. However I couldn't get this feature to work with Firefox.
If you're big on tags, you'll probably find much to love with Punakea. I'll be honest with you, all the tagging I do, be it through Flickr or ma.gnolia or what have you, is generally for others. That is, I'm not trying to make it findable by me, I'm trying to make it discoverable by others. As such I remain unconvinced that tagging has a place on my desktop; it's a great way to browse but I'm not sure it's a good way to find.
No doubt many would disagree and for them I highly recommend Punakea, it's by far the simplest and best implementation of desktop tagging that I've seen.
[1]: http://www.nudgenudge.eu/punakea "Punakea Public Beat"
|
