dekay.org

As Ⅰ have written previously Ⅰ would love to have some way of tagging functionality in iTunes.

Right now my setting looks a bit like this:

• Ⅰ use the „Grouping“ field for my tags. The tags Ⅰ am currently using are things like „slow fox“ or „rumba“ as Ⅰ am currently cataloging my collection of ballroom dance music. But Ⅰ will be using tags like „electro“ or „typical latino“ or whatever to actually describe the styles of the songs – just to get much better and faster search functionality when Ⅰ really need to find some music that is similar, e.g. when Ⅰ am preparing music to play at a dancesport competition.
• There are some cool apple scripts out that allow adding and deleting single tags from the fields „grouping“ or „comments“. The scripts Ⅰ use are really useful, but far from really what Ⅰ want (see below). Nevertheless – they are pretty close in functionality and the only thing that is out there (yet.)

What Ⅰ really would like:

• A posting interface like the experimental posting popup from del.icio.us. The features Ⅰ want are:
  • simple tag creation. just type the tag into some form field and it is created
  • re-use of old tags. show a list of tags that Ⅰ have used before, and make them clickable!
  • make the selected tags stand out from the list so Ⅰ can de-select them again!
• Some additional features for the interface:
  • Give me the choice to group tags. e.g. „Dance“ (would group Waltz, Cha-cha, Salsa). This way Ⅰ can easily select tags that are sorted in categories.
  • Give me the choice to rename tags easily.
• Some other stuff Ⅰ would love to do with these tags:
  • playlist creation based on tags – easy, fast and useful – a „there is no step 3″-approach.
  • find similarities based on tags, make music recommendations, hey, make shuffle take into account music similarity and/or diversity! (How about a setting that goes like: shuffle my music, make 5 songs similar then completely switch to a different style and do another 5 songs!)

[Update 05–05–31] There is a way to prevet Windows Server 2003 from resetting the settings – it can be found in the thread at computing.net, near the end of the page. Finally cross-plattform integration works as a charm.

[Update 05–05–14] Strangely our Windows Server resets the registry settings fixing the problem after a while thus reverting to the old behavior. Anyone know why this happens?

Ⅰ just upgraded to Tiger, our workgroup upgraded to Windows Server 2003 and now Ⅰ cannot connect to the network drives. From Finder at least. smbclient works as intended and Ⅰ would be happy – but smbclient sucks from a user friendliness perspective. No filename-completion, not one of ncftp’s nice features that make it my preferred ftp client. Anyhow, when Ⅰ use Finder to connect to the Win-Server Ⅰ always get a dialogue telling me the serve doesn’t exist and asks me if Ⅰ want to delete the alias. Yucks. (Calum seems to have a similar problem).

However, there seems to be a solution. MacWindows was of great help – although you need someone with administrator rights on the Server at hand. Especially useful was the Link to MS Knowledge Base as well as this thread at computing.net

(still strange however that smbclient would connect while mount_smbfs would not.

btw: the documentation at apple/man page of mount_smbfs is incorrect, the example files for .nsmbrc not located where they are supposed to be as the man page says. google may help.)

This goes out to the hackers and programmers:

Is there a way to add other dictionary sources to Dictionary.app in OSX Tiger? Ⅰ would love to do Wikipedia or Leo.org lookups with it! (and no, the widgets are not the option Ⅰ am looking for – Ⅰ have Apple-Ctr‑Ⅾ on a mouse button for added Fun in Safari)

And be sure to check out Automator which can assign Spotlight Comments as part of an automated workflow, allowing you to assign comments to a large number of files as a batch.

Is there an easy way to switch the current spelling dictionary in Cocoa apps without doing fancy mouse click work? And at the same time resetting the „spell check while you write highlighting“? Ⅰ frequently need to switch between german and english dictionaries…

Another cool thing would be a) auto discovery of the language or b) a use of both dictionaries at the same time.

Ⅰ have been playing around with CocoAspell for a while, too, but somehow did not like it. The Prefspane was too tedious and settings would not be sticky… and Ⅰ would rather use a „real“ OSX solution than some weird hack for something else ;(

If there are no answers to this: please Apple Engineers consider this as a feature request!