Interesting post about Together

Hello,

If you’re not following it, the blog View From The Dock has been reviewing several PIM applications, and the latest one is Together. (Here is the link to the review.)

Why do I mention this here? Because there are a couple things I’d really like to see in EagleFiler, such as:

  • landscape view (with easy access to metadata information),
  • automatic importing of new files in folders managed by EF,
  • drag and drop on tags to import, applying the tag and other actions defined by the tag (right now one has to first import the file, then drag and drop it when inside EF),
  • lists of files à la iTunes playlist.

Oh, and a pony too :wink:

Alan

The same writer did a nice review of EagleFiler, too.

Those are definitely features I want to add. No need for further convincing. :slight_smile:

EagleFiler 1.1 added the ability to import by dragging and dropping onto a tag. Is there a distinction I’m missing here?

This was on my original to-do list when developing EagleFiler, but I eventually decided that the functionality is almost exactly the same as what tags provide. EagleFiler already has folders and tags, and when to use which is a point of some confusion among new users. So in the interest of simplicity I decided not to add playlists unless lots of people wanted them. A few people have inquired over the years, but based on the feedback I’m pretty sure it was the right decision.

That said, I would certainly be interested in hearing more about what you’re doing that would make this sort of feature useful.

Sorry, I confused tags and smart folders. I’d like importing on a smart folder, because I can then apply a tag and move the file to a specific location (and while I’m dreaming, that would trigger arbitrary actions such as an Applescript to OCR the file…). We talked about it here.

Regarding iTunes-like playlist:

I’d use it for two kinds of things: quick access to some files, and having a bunch of working files. My main issue with tags for this at the moment is a mix of performance and UI issues:

  • I have too many tags (my fault), and they are in alphabetical orders. Unless I tweak their names (and leave the tag disclosure triangle open), it’s hard to find the ones I’m interesting in;
  • my current workaround is using smart folders, of which I don’t have that many (7 to be precise); but clicking on one takes 2 to 3 seconds before the data appears.

I guess I could use nested tags to organize them, and put most of the tags inside another tag to hide them.

One thing I liked about Together’s UI is the possibility to have smart folders and iTunes playlists in groups. I can easily imagine to have in some folders a set of important (working on) files that I would like to keep together. Having to go down to the tag area to get to these files seems a bit cumbersome.

(This being said, I would not imagine switching away from EF!)

That makes sense. It’s something I’d like to add. Meanwhile, this could probably be done using a folder action script in the Finder.

Are your smart folders searching by tag? I’ve done some performance work in that area recently (10x faster now). Please send me an e-mail if this interests you.

Yeah, it sounds like you basically want to have a small number of lists/tags at the top. Both nested tags and smart folders offer some functionality along these lines, although I can see how it’s not exactly what you want. Another option would be to keep a second window open that’s scrolled to a different part of the source list.

Thanks, I’ll contact you.

About having another window open, strangely enough, I really dislike having several EF windows open. I don’t know why, I should just try it.

Together sounds great, from that review–but the deal-killer for me is no multiple libraries. Nice to hear that Michael is considering the “landscape” mode. (As I’ve written before, I’d like it, too, if there were a few more visual cues to differentiate EF from other Mac apps; Together seems to do that well.)

I’ve been pondering the “playlist” feature a bit more while thinking about another feature I would like which supersedes it: aliases.

A playlist could simply be a list of aliases to the items of interest. One could easily change the folder icon to reflect the playlist status.

Using aliases bring two other interesting features:

  • one could mix aliases with normal files, which is not possible in playlists
  • aliases can easily be reflected in the file system (using aliases :wink: )

(Two side notes about this post:

  • I just discovered that when I change a folder icon in the Finder, it’s reflected in EF; is there a way to do it from EF itself?
  • I’m playing with a classification based on this post, where a lot of information is encoded in the file name. This approach is fairly robust as batch renaming of files makes changing the classification fairly simple. What I’m trying to do is have the files inside EF, so this is yet another vote for the “import created files in EF’s hierarchy” feature acknowledged above. This way I could also have my Notational Velocity folder live inside EF.)

Great, because links/aliases are already something I’m considering.

Not yet.

I’ve added this in EagleFiler 1.5.

With EagleFiler 1.6, first copy an image to the clipboard; then you can right-click on a folder in the source list and choose Paste Icon.