For much of my Mac-using existence, I’ve been a tagger. This means that not only have I arranged my documents into files and folders, but I apply tags to them as well.
On the Mac, this has been accomplished by a rather hacky standard called OpenMeta.
The nice thing about OpenMeta is that many software applications and OS X Spotlight searches support it. For example, I could manually tag a document with TagIt, or automatically tag a document with Hazel, and use a Spotlight search to find the documents that use those tags.
The not-so-nice thing about OpenMeta is that it has never been officially supported by Apple, so knowledgable taggers were always waiting to see if the next version of OS X is the one that finally kills it.
I’m not sure if 10.9 OS X Mavericks is that version, but what I do know is that tagging is now officially supported.
How this will interact with OpenMeta (if at all) and what happens to our existing tags is still unknown, but I will be keenly watching to see what happens.
Either way, it is nice to see tagging going mainstream on the Mac, and the usual warnings about tagging apply: just because you can tag something, doesn’t mean that you should.
Watch this space for more as it becomes available.
