4 ms·

This headline excited me but then I read their website. It's an electron-like file manager that tries to do too many things instead of focusing on the core fea

This headline excited me but then I read their website. It's an electron-like file manager that tries to do too many things instead of focusing on the core feature of tagging. I had a product plan once upon a time that included a filesystem driver to let you browse using tags eg. c:\tags\my project. That would make it work in all your existing software and file dialogs. The hierarchical nature of traditional filesystems is great when you want to "visit" everything (eg. browse through a folder to clean it up, enumerate to backup, calculate sizes, etc). But it's a constraint when you need to categorize a file in more than one place (eg. receipts / project X / resin purchases / March credit card expenses). Windows has a tagging feature but nobody really uses it - it's exposed in Explorer, but not the Save dialog of most apps (another thing the envisioned product was supposed to fix).

polote 5y ago
> The hierarchical nature of traditional filesystems is great when you want to "visit" everything Not really more than tags. Tags are superior to hierarchy of folders when a content can belongs to several folders. If you have very different folders, like 'Finance' and 'My pictures' then folders are going to be better. The issue with tags, is that if they are not restricted to a folder, you will have hundreds of them and you will have a hard time managing them. The best trade off I have found is to create a hierarchy of fat folders (a few very distinct big folders) and a different tags taxonomy inside each one of them. If you want to tags content of different folders you need a new tag taxonomy only for cross tagging content. To sum up: - Hierarchical folders - Each folder has its own tag list - A Meta tags list to tag cross-folders content (which I prefer to call "collections")
- rkagerer 5y ago
  > Not really more than tags All I meant is there are use cases where you only want each item to show up once (eg. show me a list of all my files). In my product, a file with multiple tags would show up in multiple folders - which is great until you hit one of the above use cases. One way to accommodate is to just classify according to the "primary" tag in such circumstances (provided its clear the eg. first tag has some added weight).
makeitdouble 5y ago
One issue with tagging is it's a surprisingly personal and complicated topic IMO, at least enough so that generic apps can be complicated/costly to make for that purpose. For instance I tag by date people, and purpose (e.g. 2021 tax declaration), and I want the date to always come first, but the rest should have a stable order, I want most of the tags in the file name, and ideally some meta groups handled outside (e.g. "official papers") I'm not holding my breath for an app that does that, and paradoxaly it's also simple enough for me to build a home made partial solution. Picky customers that also will try to solve their own problems and only see value for the difference with their solution feels like a hell for any service company.

polote 5y ago

> The hierarchical nature of traditional filesystems is great when you want to "visit" everything Not really more than tags. Tags are superior to hierarchy of folders when a content can belongs to several folders. If you have very different folders, like 'Finance' and 'My pictures' then folders are going to be better. The issue with tags, is that if they are not restricted to a folder, you will have hundreds of them and you will have a hard time managing them. The best trade off I have found is to create a hierarchy of fat folders (a few very distinct big folders) and a different tags taxonomy inside each one of them. If you want to tags content of different folders you need a new tag taxonomy only for cross tagging content. To sum up: - Hierarchical folders - Each folder has its own tag list - A Meta tags list to tag cross-folders content (which I prefer to call "collections")

rkagerer 5y ago
> Not really more than tags All I meant is there are use cases where you only want each item to show up once (eg. show me a list of all my files). In my product, a file with multiple tags would show up in multiple folders - which is great until you hit one of the above use cases. One way to accommodate is to just classify according to the "primary" tag in such circumstances (provided its clear the eg. first tag has some added weight).

makeitdouble 5y ago

One issue with tagging is it's a surprisingly personal and complicated topic IMO, at least enough so that generic apps can be complicated/costly to make for that purpose. For instance I tag by date people, and purpose (e.g. 2021 tax declaration), and I want the date to always come first, but the rest should have a stable order, I want most of the tags in the file name, and ideally some meta groups handled outside (e.g. "official papers") I'm not holding my breath for an app that does that, and paradoxaly it's also simple enough for me to build a home made partial solution. Picky customers that also will try to solve their own problems and only see value for the difference with their solution feels like a hell for any service company.