Gravity applications taGs
TAGS, You’re IT!
Twenty-five years after the first Mac drove the graphical user interface’s
commercial success, the go-to method for organizing and managing files on the
Mac is still to use the Finder. And there’s nothing wrong with that—especially
for linear thinkers who tend to compartmentalize life into hierarchical structures
that lend themselves to the files-within-folders vertical structure computer
users are used to.
And then there are apps like
PersonalBrain ( www.thebrain.com) that
let you manage files on your hard drive
by grouping them conceptually, linking
groups of related ideas, rather than
just shoving your files into particular
folders. Gravity Applications’ Tags offers
a middle-ground file-wrangling solution
that applies the Internet 2.0 concept of
tags—think Delicious.com, Flickr, and
others—to file management, allowing
you to manage and locate files easily,
based on how they’re tagged, not where
they’re stored. To be clear, PersonalBrain
also leaves your files’ physical location
alone—merely associating files with
ideas in a visual way. But for whatever
reason—perhaps because we tend to
think in words rather than pictures—the
tagging metaphor Tags uses makes
way more sense and seems much more
Press Control-spacebar twice to go into Search
mode, type or click on the tags you’re looking
natural to us than the “idea cloud” for, and they show up in a list at the bottom.
metaphor employed by other software.
Tags works by letting you quickly tag files, folders, webpages, emails, and
other items on your Mac with custom keywords. We especially like the ability to
batch-tag by selecting a group of files in the Finder and pressing Tags’ magic key
combo, Control-spacebar, which calls up the Tags window and lets you add new
tags using existing tags or by creating new ones on the fly. Pressing Control-spacebar again flips the Tags window to Search mode, which is how you find
your files based on their tags. In a particularly Mac-friendly turn, you can also
do a Tags search directly in Spotlight, typing in, for example, tag: personal,
which will bring up all the files to which you assigned the “personal” tag.
After a few weeks using Tags, we were hooked—and we found pressing
Control-spacebar became a hard-to-break habit. And though OS X supports file
tagging via Spotlight Comments, the lack of a simple, useful interface for adding
them makes Comments somewhat useless. Tags, on the other hand,
offered just the kind of interface we’ve been looking for. We were
only less than thrilled with Tags when, occasionally, multiple tags ran
together, rather than showing up separately. We also found ourselves
wishing we could skip the step of clicking Apply once we created or
selected tags for an item.
taGs
Gravity Applications
www.gravityapps.com
Price: $29
requirements: Mac OS 10. 5
The bottom line. Tags offers a fast, intuitive way to manage
files and other items by assigning them keyword tags, a perfect
file-management system that’s more flexible than using the Finder
alone, but not so abstract that it defies a linear organizational
system.—Leslie Ayers
Tagging allows flexibility lacking
in traditional folder structures.
We wish tags would be added
without having to click Apply.
Mac|Life GREAT
RATED
