Tag Archive for 'tagging'

DevonThink Pro usage notes

Published by dekay on June 14, 2006 in mac. 0 Comments

This thread in the DevonThink forums talks about various uses of DTP, but focusing on the “how to organize your Devon Think library.” There are multiple ways, each having its benefits — after all YOU need to be working with it, so in a way the structure might resemble the way you think or work. But it all comes down to utilizing the powers of teh DevonThink AI: group stuff together that needs to be grouped. Group similar stuff. File Things wherever they might belong. This way the AI learns and will help you later when filing new stuff where it might belong to.

You could also tag your files (e.g. via their comments) and then grab the tagged files via a smart folder (see 43Folders for a detailed article on this). btw a very useful feature that can also be used in Finder.app: You can very easily set finder/spotlight comments via a Quicksilver-Plugin and then assemble all related items with a smart folder (or saved search from spotlight). e.g. I have a projects.smartfolder that contains all my current projects’ folders (tagged with “@project,” of course), no matter where they are. You could also be more specific and just get all files tagged with “@recipe” and “@baking”… you get the idea.

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Technorati for science

Published by dekay on November 11, 2005 in science. 0 Comments

Where is the technorati for science? A site that accumulates all abstracts of scientific publications that you can search for - based on content, author, publication, keywords. A site that offers RSS feeds for those searches.

What else could be done with a system like this?

  • it would be very easy to stay up-to-date with current scientific progress - new publications on a subject would just appear in your inbox
  • there would finally be a single place that would be the source of all your inquiries - your RSS feed reader! User’s choice!
  • since RSS feeds can contain quite a bunch of meta data it would be very easy to integrate your reference manager - just point and click and save the abstract plus reference info, directly from the feed reader.
  • integrate the system with social reference managers like citeUlike or connotea - making those social networks and meta information much more valuable as well as accessible.

But then I just realize this may not ever going to happen - too many publishers are probably afraid of sharing that much freely; the service would probably be even interesting to scientists if it was not for free, if academic discounts are available.

Onlife

Published by dekay on September 20, 2005 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Onlife is a strange little application that logs your use of your mac, archives what you do and so on. I don’t know if this is good, privacy issues are important as well - but journalling and log keeping is good, too.

Now if it would be more useful and could track more apps - it might even be useful for tracking client’s projects and billing etc.

Gotta watch its progress and applicability.

iTunes tagging

Published by dekay on September 4, 2005 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Wikipedia may help with getting your music collection organized. Although I still think the “Genre” Tag in MP3s is useless in its current incarnation. What use makes it when you can browse music by genre but then try to classify not in broad genres but in much detail? So my solution is to use the general broad genre and then fine tune by using the” grouping” tag.

Software Request: mp3-Tagger à la del.icio.us

Published by dekay on June 11, 2005 in lazyweb and technology. 0 Comments

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!)