Hintonblogger

This started out as an email to my brother about something I had mentioned to him earlier, but I soon realized that I needed to blog about this and he could read it there.
I don't know if you create a lot of off-line documents (I do, especially training guides) but today I wanted to classify/save a document two ways, one as category and the other as a specific date 2006-07 and wondered what folder to create to put it in - just the category or to nest the category(folder) inside of a 2006-07 folder, etc. A little conundrum. Obviously tagging my document in much the same way I would a blog post would be one potential solution, but I didn't know how I could easily (or if at all) do that. I figured somebody else had to have problems with this so I googled "tagging files with metadata categories" to see what solutions to the problem I could find.

I need to add that I know a lot of effort has been made in the last few years to bring great search capability to both the PC and the Mac platforms. Google Desktop, Windows Desktop Search, as well as Apple's OS X Spotlight capability. Microsoft's WinFS improvements seemed to be moving along this road as well as Apple's Smart Folders, but I still think that is different than having the capability to tag files on save. It's nice to be able to use awesome searching tools to find documents, but I still like to feel I have some control over where documents go, or at least appear to go. In minds eye, I visualize file structure being not necessarily reflective of actual storage locations, which are limited to one, but for me merging the concept of smart folders (with the capability of nesting smart folders to resemble an artificial directory tree) and tagging can lead to a truly powerful, totally customizable file structure for each user. Ideally this will be a capability built-in to the system so that any program (from which a save dialog box is called) automatically can offer the user the option to tag his document upon save. I also think it should be free tagging, though maybe there is a benefit to a pre-created category option as well, provided a user would go through the hassle/preparation of thinking of any and all tags he or she might want to use, before they have to actually use them.

I'm a new reader to lifehacker.com but they have some good articles about how to work better in this digital age and sure enough, in my google search the sixth article mentioned was from Lifehacker. Another article that was useful and more specific to MS Windows is from Big IDEA. Good stuff and definitely worth keeping my eye on, now if only there were a right now solution that didn't involve using Quicksilver.