Comments on: OpenMeta coming soon to Default Folder X

By: Jon

Jon — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 14:30:25 +0000

I posted a summary to a new thread on the Ironic discussion boards at http://ironicsoftware.com/community/comments.php?DiscussionID=755/ and we’ve got a bit more talk going on there. Basically, after looking over Tom’s data and discussing it more, I think what he’s got for OpenMeta is a good solution. It may require changes as time goes on, but I think that OpenMeta can evolve safely and usefully. It’s a good, practical solution to the problem at hand.

By: metaman

metaman — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 00:57:49 +0000

I’m also very glad to hear conversations are going on. You might want to encourage Tom to put just a brief note to that effect in the now quite well-known “OpenMeta is a hack” thread. That’s where people are being directed from Daring Fireball and they may not think to look elsewhere; a quick bit of reassurance that Tom’s aware of issues and is actively thinking about them would go a long, long way.

By: Matthew

Matthew — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 21:12:47 +0000

Glad to hear the conversations are taking place! Thanks for the update. I hope an approved approach emerges soon as well. I’ll wait to hear here and/or in the Ironic Software forums.

By: Jon

Jon — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 05:50:01 +0000

Tom and I are talking about it, and Tom has also asked Apple for feedback. We’re both hoping Apple can shed some light on things. As it currently stands, none of the solutions are perfect, and we’d both like an approved, spotlight-searchable way to store tags that will last for years.

By: Matthew

Matthew — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 16:08:15 +0000

Jon,

I’ve been trying to decide whether to post another message in the Ironic Software discussion on OpenMeta’s use of the com.apple namespace (the thread referenced above in Ioozer’s post). There have been a few postings in the past week there expressing *hope* that back channel discussions are taking place between the developers concerned about the com.apple choice (such as yourself, your posting in the tread is very good in my opinion) and the Ironic Software developers. You are mentioned in particular in one posting (“Hopefully Jon and Tom will be having some discussion.”) So, I’m wondering, are there discussions taking place or, as it appears from the discussion thread, are the Ironic people ignoring this issue and hoping it just goes away? I really hope discussions of some sort are taking place. Can you shed any light on this?

- Matthew

By: Jon

Jon — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 15:45:05 +0000

Yes – I’ve been reading the discussion but haven’t had a chance to jump in (a family emergency has been consuming a lot of my time for the last week). I’ll try and sort things out today.

By: loozer

loozer — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 01:30:02 +0000

This is great news. You might want to visit the discussion thread linked to from Daring Fireball, discussing the wisdom or otherwise of using com.apple.metadata to save the OpenMeta tags. Many of us non-developers don’t really have much of a basis for judging the merits of the case, so we hope that more developers will weigh in so that whatever solution makes most sense is adopted:

http://ironicsoftware.com/community/comments.php?DiscussionID=632&page=1#Item_0

By: Jon

Jon — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 16:33:32 +0000

That’s what we’re hoping for, Rob. I’m working on it now

By: BLUEFROG

BLUEFROG — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 16:32:45 +0000

@Rob Lewis: That’s what we’ve all been wondering for a loong time… why didn’t Apple start this?!? 8^)

SpotMeta was a great attempt at a similar thing but required some mechanics that we don’t need to use. It would be interesting to see whre the dev is and what he thinks of our project.

We are really hoping to get more developers involved in the project and we are proud to see so many great apps looking at it, like Jon at St. Clair Software.

Keep spreading the word! (Oh and if you want to buy some of our apps too – we won’t mind! LOL)

Cheers,
Jim Neumann
BLUEFROG
The Ironic Software Team

By: Rob Lewis

Rob Lewis — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 15:40:08 +0000

Hooray for you and OpenMeta! (Q: why didn’t Apple start promoting something like this years ago?).

There’s an interesting project called SpotMeta that attempted to do similar things, but it’s long inactive and only works with Tiger.

With MailTags committed to supporting OpenMeta, we may have the beginnings of a movement here! Maybe the developer community can turn Spotlight into what it always should have been!