Katie and David, joined by Mac mad scientist Brett Terpstra, cover the many ways to organize and find files on your Mac. This show includes tips on tagging, spotlight, naming conventions and more.
Links of note
Brett’s Site
Ben Brooks on Notational Velocity Naming
Feedback Links
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Glad you could fit Tinderbox in…
HoudahSpot, which is my favorite search app, was mentioned, but there is a better way to buy it. It is normally $30, but The Mac Bundles, at http://macappdeals.com/2010/03/23/themacbundles-build-your-own-bundle-store/ has a build your own bundle option where you can buy 5 apps for $5.95 each or 10 apps for $4.95 each, so if you buy the 5 app bundle, you can get HoudahSpot plus 4 other apps for the same price. Another Houdah app, HoudahGeo, is one of the options, but there are many useful utilities as options.
I wonder if it possible to use Hazel to auto tag files using the keywords inside a file.
Interesting show. One question and two observations:
1. What is the difference between the 2 versions of Notational Velocity? You seemed to be asking Brett that but then the question seemed to get lost somewhere.
2. This probably ultimately falls into the fanboy-speaking-up-for-his favorite-apps category, but I think you’ve semi-missed the point of Yep’s seemingly-all-in-one-folder view. As you mentioned, you can navigate the folder hierarchy in Yep. That means you can drill down to a folder way down in the hierarchy and view the files therein just as you could in the Finder. You can also move up to any arbitrary level in the folder hierarchy and see not only all the immediate contents of that folder but also the contents of sub-folders. The reason this is (in my view) all upside is that you can instantly use the location column to focus on another micro-grouping if you need to. It’s all about providing flexible views on your files.
3. I love Merlin for all his humor, enthusiasm, and wealth of ideas. But has he finished his book? If not, arguably his tips are less useful in actually helping him to get things done as yours (and about as useful as mine). Please don’t misunderstand: I’ll listen to and no doubt thoroughly enjoy the show, but I think for many creative types the acid test is whether you can start and finish a major project like writing a book for publication in a year or so.
@Rick point #3. Some great teachers are lousy performers. Not calling Merlin a lousy performer at all, but perhaps he’s better at helping us be efficient than he is at being efficient himself.
Fastest dictionary search: “Look Up in Dictionary” service via launchbar
What about Leap? You mentioned Yep, which is for PDF files, but Leap is a general-purpose file browser that can do tagging, and shows the clouds in a much more intuitive way than the other software, in my opinion. I am test-driving it now.
Did you ever get Leap — if so, what’s your opinion.
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Thx
Thanks for the pointer to Filr. That’s exactly the kind of thing I was looking for.
I wasn’t necessarily trying to convert David to digital, but I wanted others to know about Note Taker HD. The newest version added drawing shapes (aside from freehand).
More good stuff guys! One problem I have is that whilst I feel I pretty much have everything set up for me to find things – via Notational Velocity/SimpleNotes and Evernote – how do you find the things you have forgotten you have?!
I seem to remember Merlin uses a ‘qqq’ prefix on his text notes to indicate something to re-look at – something like this for general files would be good. Maybe that is where tagging would come in.
Rich
My enthusiasm for a tagging a shallow file system is also renewed but I still have one concern and that’s attaching files to email using the gmail interface. I hate drilling down but at least I can find what I need to attach. Anyone have a good workflow ?
I have trialled mailplane, was underwhelmed but still intended to buy it, when I heard the version of mail in Lion is likely to be a lot closer to mailplane than it is now so I’m back to gmail in a browser and drilling for now
I finally get it – if David wasn’t a true convert to the power of tagging before this show, no wonder he doesn’t think much of Evernote!
Evernote without solid tagging is a fairly placid data platform, so no wonder your constant complaint is that you can get stuff in but you can’t get it out. With a flat folder hierarchy and a robust tagging system, Evernote could be a multi-platform alternative to all your other system work-arounds. It turns out tagging was the secret-sauce!
The mystery of David’s Evernote disdain solved!
I think this is the third time I’ve heard David mention the speed increase of moving his Aperture library from his FW800 Drobo onto his new, internal disk. David seems to chalk this up to mostly performance issues with FireWire but the truth is that the FireWire 800 performance is probably being throttled by The Drobo.
I’ve replaced all my USB2 external enclosures with eSata ones with the exception of my Drobo which I solely use for my SuperDuper backups. Analysis of the performance of all the Drives on my machine shows the Drobo FW800 drive running only slightly faster than a USB2 drive. The Drobo ‘secret sauce’ definitely makes the device run well below it’s FW800 potential. I’m sure that putting your library back on a normal FW800 external device would return your Aperture performance back to something much more acceptable.
I’ve put all my benchmarks in the article below which highlights how disappointing the Drobo is as FW800 external storage. BUT it must not be forgotten that it DOES remain a FANTASTIC external backup solution
http://www.theapplechap.com/TheAppleChap/Blog/Entries/2010/7/19_Using_eSATA_drives_on_a_Mac.html
I totally love my eSata solution but cannot wait until I can put a Thunderbolt card in my Mac Pro and enjoy even faster performance!
The need for quick access to a dictionary has come up in more than one episode of the podcast, like the most recent episode and the Launch Bar episode. I was surprised not to hear anyone bring up my favorite shortcut, Command+Control+D while your cursor is over the word in question. This little built-in dictionary shortcut is great, particularly for those of us who are terrible at spelling. I despise leaving the app I’m working in and launching the dictionary app. I love the fact that you can press it once and it sticks to the word with the full dictionary entry or you can hold the keys and move around to different words.
A word of warning, while it works in the great majority of Mac apps, not all support it. I believe that it is only fairly old apps that do not support it, but I haven’t really investigated it since I’ve never actually run into the problem myself.
@Rick,
Merlin’s book is much *heavier* than mine and I can understand why he is taking his time with it. Also, I think he has encountered more difficulties from publishers than I did. I’m certain it will be great when it’s done.
Finally the Openmeta show! Thanks guys
I have been on the tagging bandwagon for well over a year now.
I would like to mention the ironic software app Fresh.
This app will let you display a HUD of your latest files with a keyboard shortcut, you can then keyboard navigate to the file, and open it. But hitting return will bring up tagging window to easily tag the file.
See screenshot here: http://www.poder.dk/stuff/Fullscreen-20110319-124524.jpg
I also run Default Folder X for tagging when saving (Brilliant)
And I generally use spotligt search to recall files. I used Leap/tags/etc. for a while but I actually think spotligt searching is more flexible.
Will check out houdahspot though.
But I’ll really recommend adding fresh to your tagging setup.
- Jens Poder
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When I use tagging, i want to use it for Smart Folders that I’ve already created, and I want to integrate rule-based organization for it.
Until Evernote allows me to set up rules that will automatically move files around with various tags, I can’t really use it for what I want to use it for. I know that I can tag and search for tags, but it’d be great if Evernote offered “Smart Notebooks” to go along with their tagging.
Q. Are open meta tags synced via dropbox?
My apologies if that was covered and I missed it. But with great MPU coverage of both tagging and dropbox, I need to clarify how they interact.
Thanks.
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Pingback: Finding files | Academic workflows on Mac
Hmmm… Just fooled around with Brett’s textexpander snippets.
Modified one for my own use. I often need to put hyperlinks into google spreadsheets.
The way to do this is to write =hyperlink(“URL”;”LINKTEXT”) in the datafield. Needless to say this is annoying.
So now I have modified one of Brett’s snippets to take the URL from the clipboard and prompt for a link-text when I write ,,GL.
Check it out here if you need it: http://poder.dk/2011/09/06/links-to-google-spreadsheet-with-textexpander/
Thanks so much for clearly defining hunters vs gatherers. When I first started using iPhoto I hated it (still do) and now I know why – it is built on the hunter mentality. So now, in my quest to go paperless, I know that nested folders is perfect for me. Katie, you mentioned in Merlin Mann II that you use folders for most of your bills but you use an application for the receipts. Which application is your current favorite and why does it work better than folders for the receipts?