Tags 2 uses Michael original solution

I just down loaded and looked at the changes of Tags 2 beta. Here is the change they made is to rely on spotlight comments , copy existing OM tags to spotlight comments. Tags 2 will continue to store a (copy) of the tags into extended attributes but will rely on the tags that are stored in Spotlight comments . They give reasons of new speeds of Spotlight in OS X 10.6, changes the way SL uses xtndedatt and some applications that didn’t work will with OM.

I think this was the solution origninally made by Michael in longwided debate on OM.
Questions :Will EF go the same route ?
Is OM unravelling before becoming a defacto standard ?
(Tags now only searches spotlight comment tags, although it writes to spotlight comments and xtndedattributes !!) So it will not find EF tags !!!) which was irritating !!

The root problem is that OpenMeta stores tags in the extended attributes, and Mac OS X 10.6 has a bug where the Cocoa layer does not preserve the extended attributes when saving files.

EagleFiler users are not directly affected. EagleFiler stores the tags in its database, and it will automatically copy them to the extended attributes if they get deleted. Also, EagleFiler uses Core Services rather than Cocoa for saving files, so it continues to preserve other applications’ extended attributes when editing files.

EagleFiler still has support for importing and exporting tags to the Spotlight comments, so you should be able to use it with Tags 2. The speed of searching the Spotlight comments may be improved, but reading and writing are still very slow, so I don’t think this is a good solution going forward.

In spite of the OS bug, I still think that extended attributes are the best place to store tags for interchange between applications. EagleFiler will continue to use the agreed upon OpenMeta storage locations, and I hope that other developers will, too.