Forming the tag

Hey melprice,
you're right, we think it is necessary to keep all Punakea tags separate. You said it yourself: Several other apps out there are also adding stuff to the Spotlight comment. By surrounding our tags we make sure that there's no cluttering.
Anyway, for future versions we'll check on how Punakea and Quicksilver might go along smoothly. The delimiters may also change in the final release - do you have a better idea on what characters to use?
Cheers, Daniel

By default Quicksilver uses the @ symbol but it can be changed in preferences. Do you need to keep the tags seperate from any other programs that write to the Comments field? I'm not sure if you need to do that to for the correct operation of Punakea.

If it's not important I can see 2 ways to go.

1. Just append the tags to any others already there. I'm sure you keep a list of tags the user has entered internally. You can then use your internal list to form the tag cloud and to display any files with those tags in the comments field.

2. Append your tags and and when the program opens, do a search for all tags that start with the delimiter whether it's @ or whatever. Use that list inside Punakea as the tag cloud.

I'm not an application programmer so I don't know if these ideas are even fesible.

Great program all the same. If I didn't have QS these features wouldn't be an issue.

Just a suggestion:

mark the Punakea tags as punakea:tagname. Put "punakea:" before every tag name.
Apple works with tags to identify the document as type:bookmark, type:image and so on.

The trick is very simple... just append a prepend a white space to the tag name

so
###begin_tags### @gnome ; @cairo ;###end_tags###

will work with qs. Now problems comes with tags with spaces, althoug qs don't support that i guess.

I've tried lots of different tagging methods & have finally stuck with just using the & character as a prefix. I've never have any problems with it, but I have had a lot of unwanted search results just using @ as the prefix.

This is the thing that's stopping me from using Punakea all the time. I've got lots & lots of tags using the & prefix & don't want to start going through converting everything.

I think it would make sense to let people specify their own prefix or tagging method in Punakea's preferences (but set the Punakea way as the default). Then people could switch from their existing method of tagging or tagging software really easily.
Every now & then I take a look at the Spotlight comments of a file to check I don't have any unwanted stuff in there from earlier, & as melprice says the Punakea way makes it really cluttered.

I don't see why Punakea needs to keep their tags separate from others? To me it just isolates it from people being able to use other apps or switching from using a different app or method to Punakea. Whereas at the moment I can try out Quicksilver, Default Folder X, Automator, TagBot etc. without having to do anything drastic.

Hey all,
please read my comment above to get the answer to why we're using the delimiters. It's a temporary solution, though. We're waiting for final improvements to Spotlight in Leopard and may switch from Spotlight comment field to a more sophisticated one. Anyway, this may take some time until Leopard finally ships.
Cheers, Daniel

Hey,
that's some info!
Thanks ;)

Hi Daniel,

Can you elaborate on why it's necessary to keep Punakea tags separate from other apps?

For example, if I were to use both Quicksilver and Punakea to tag files with a common prefix, I would think that it's better to have the tags compatible with each other.

Even if other apps add other (non-metatag) information, the prefix should keep things separate (tags with spaces notwithstanding perhaps.)

Of course, there might be technical reasons for keeping them separate that I'm not aware of.

Thanks!
Steve

Hi Steve, okay, let's go into the details:

• Punakea & Quicksilver: Even if we do not use the delimiters and store tags the same way as QS does, there is the tag database that is out of sync for both apps. QS and Punakea have a separate library to keep track of all tags currently assigned to any file. Anyway, we'll try to get a seamless integration later on, that's one of our major todos.
• Plain Text + Tags: We might extract the tags from a mixture of text + tags from the Spotlight comment field. Problems will arise when you use the prefix in the text part (by mistake?) - prefix be & or @ for instance.

Most probably we'll offer a way to customize the style of how tags are stored in the Spotlight comment with the upcoming release. So if you don't like the delimiters and do not use third-party apps that use the comment field, too, you can just skip them. :)

Cheers, Daniel

Hi,

I think the most annoying part of the currently selected tag is the overhead. The prefix and suffix is just too long. At least I am using the comments field not only for tags, so in finder, the comments field looks like a mess after using Punakea to add tags to some files.

Second, as already mentioned, the tag compatibility. I would prefere a universal way of tagging files, so that all apps, utils and searches always displays the same tags, and returns the same result when searching and displaying a particular collection of tagged files. Which I think leads to using Spotlight to generate the tag list just-in-time or by updating an internal list every hour or so (also using Spotlight), instead of maintaining a separate db. The idea of a separate db is so .. Windows. Also for this to be possible, a unique and reserved tag identifier should have been universally accepted and delpoyed. Not going to happen just yet I guess, meanwhile the & seems to work fairly well.

I hope Punakea will support the use of NOT, as I often narrow my search for photos in iPhoto by using NOT and would love to be able to do the same with tags in general.

On a side not, trying to recreate the traditional look of a tag, with one pointy side and one straight edge, would lead to a tag with not too much overhead, and a unique format (unballanced delimiters is not commonly found in any text I think). Then I think a tag could look something like this:

<tag]

Containing only lower case and without any whitespaces.

"Here's to [tag] development harmony. *tips glass*" ~ Kurt, primary editor of FlipCode.com

<tag] not only looks like a clean, unique prefix & suffix that could work well, it even looks like a tag :)

Hi Daniel,

Thanks so much for the response, that makes the issues much clearer (I figured there had to be some underlying technical reason...)

I think having customization will be great. I also understand that tagging from different apps (QS, Puakea, or just the Finder) will have certain side effects. So far I am finding that Punakea is the best way to tag, so the whole thing is not a big issue for me.

The comment below about using a shorter (but still unique) delimiter is a good one. Of course, customizeable tags and delimiter lets everyone customize as they wish.

Thanks again and keep up the great work!
Steve

I think if tags can be customized in a later release, the user can then do things however they wish.

Although I understand your comments about a separate db, I do find using Punakea to find files is much faster than Spotlight. IF Spotlight performance can be improved in Leopard, then I would be more comfortable with relying on Spotlight only for finding tags.

Once you've made the change/upgrade, will it be possible to "upgrade" existing tags to this new style or will that be something we'll have to script/automate?

Thanks, Clif

Punakea will update the Spotlight comments for you! ;)