Recently I have been stumbling across debates on OpenMeta's future. The notion seems to be, that when Lion becomes Mountain Lion, Apple's new Appstore policies will choke the tagging hack, that so many geeks have come to use.
I have been a user of OpenMeta tagging since I got hooked on Fresh by ironic software three years ago. To be able to tag and search your files across a number of apps. Today I am using a whole range of programs with OpenMeta. These are the primary ones:
- Tags from - let's you append tags to any file in the finder and search and organize them
- Default Folder X let's you add tags when saving
Here's the Article from Macdrifter
This article on openmeta future from macdrifter started my qualms. Gabe Weatherhead writes
> It makes me wonder what the future of OpenMeta is. It also makes me wonder when Apple will make Finder comments actually compatible with tags. I’ve never felt comfortable with the future of OpenMeta. I wonder if the AppStore will mean the end of OpenMeta.
Damn! I felt that uneasiness when I jumped that tagging wagon myself.
From Default Folder X
It all started when I got this message upgrading Default Folder X.
>* Recent OpenMeta tags are now read separately from Leap and Yep because the new Mac App Store versions of these applications cannot share their recent tags via the standard OpenMeta mechanism. * Worked around a problem that caused Mathematica to hang after it launched if Default Folder X was enabled.'
Separately? Separetely? I don't want separately! I want my good old OpenMeta like it used to be. Handing me the latest tags from across the system
Pathfinder updated with openmeta tagging
So I poked around a little on the sites of developers, that implements OpenMeta into their tags. On Path Finder 6 the tagging was shown of as primary feature on their finder replacement software.
But in their support forum the picture gets a little less clear. Cocoatech support on openmeta says that it's sort of half-baked in.
And when searching Twitter for information on OpenMeta, I even found notorious geeks considering a switch to Path Finder.
Ok, I thought I'd left Path Finder behind, but 6 patches up so many things. Plus OpenMeta and a new Git module built in… — Brett Terpstra (@ttscoff) April 17, 2012
But I must say that the amount of tweets mentioning OpenMeta was REALLY low in general. So perhaps the fine art of OpenMeta tagging is something done by not such a lot of geeks in the end.
Brett Terpstras opinion
So I just ended up tweeting Brett at @ttschof. The answer was pretty upsetting.
@jenspoder he's pretty much right. I've been pondering replacements for a bit now. — Brett Terpstra (@ttscoff) April 21, 2012
Dang! "What a loss..." I replied with a little teary smiley.
@jenspoder nah, it won't die so fast that we won't have time to transfer our meta to whatever's next. Flexibility is beautiful.
— Brett Terpstra (@ttscoff) april 21, 2012
And with that, I'll just keep on churning out those tags. Here's to a bright future of tag based file browsing!
Related stuff:
- Macpowerusers on tagging with Brett Terpstra
- On sorting, tagging and other nerdery
