Hi, there,
This summer there was an interesting discussion about tagging in one of the other Scrivener sections. I thought I’d “collect some data” (i.e., put everything on the desktop for the last three months) to see how I might go about tagging given my own work style. Well, that did turn into an interesting mess. In trying to work through it, I found a piece of software, purportedly a replacement for the Finder (in Leopard), that makes tagging much easier than I’ve seen before. (Also made the full dimensions of the mess easier to grasp.)
Leap (ironicsoftware.com/leap/index.html) is somewhat semi-structured, allowing you to find stuff using different pieces of metadata and your own tags (which optionally can be put in Comments). I was pretty thrilled when I created a new filetype for Scrivener. It not only immediately found all the Scrivener files, but the thumbnail image has the same nifty Scrivener icon with a list of the top items in the binder that the fancy view has in Leopard. I’ve only been playing around with this for the day, but I’d be interested in hearing if any of you have toyed with it and formed and opinion.
Leap is quite a bit more ambitious than Punakea. Leap gives you thumbnails of filetypes, like all your Word or Image files, and then invites you to tag them. To get a blown-up view of the file, you click on a Loupe button and move a magnifying square over the thumbnail.
You may filter your searches by location, date, and so on. It’s fairly fast, but it appears to rebuild the search each time you make it, and so far I’ve not been able to figure out how to make a Smart Folder or Saved Search, which I may do in FileSpot (formerly MoRU).
You may download a demo version of Leap and use it for 21 days. If you purchase the beta, it’s $39; later it will be $69. At $10 FileSpot is the bargain, but it doesn’t show a massive display of files as thumbnails.
It’s worth noting that Leap is not a true file system tagging solution. Although they’ve got plans to export Leap tags to Spotlight comments, if you want to browse your tags effectively you need to use Leap.
That said, it’s promising software. I interviewed the developer about Leap shortly after the public beta came out, and I’m certainly looking forward to seeing what they do with the release version.
I hadn’t heard about the final release price, though. $70 seems really high (considering the tagging competition ranges around $40 for excellent file libraries and free-$20 for Spotlight tagging). Too bad the “buy Yep and get Leap free” deal is over.
Just as I had promised myself I would stop procrastinating, that I would get back to doing some ‘real’ work, along comes this intriguing idea.
