hello –
thanks for the very nice program. i have a feature suggestion. the short version is: it would be nice if eaglefiler directly supported os x bundles (“packages” in the developer docs) as taggable documents, and could view / modify / index the constituents of those bundles.
the long version :
often times, one has multiple physical documents which are logically a single entity. examples of this include
- PDF paper + bibliographic / bibtex citation (BibDesk)
- bookmark + (multiple) HTML / webarchive snapshots of the same web page
- (small) source code repository tree (e.g. one or more .h and associated .C files)
- multiple chapters / different formats of an electronic book
- skim PDF + notes bundles
- application bundles
i’m sure people can think of more examples.
some of these are already directly supported by EagleFiler (skim bundles, for example.) some are not. right now there are a two different ways to handle the non-supported cases :
1 - create a folder for each entity
2 - create a tag for each entity
the problem with folders is that folders are not records in eaglefiler – they can’t be tagged and they can’t be indexed (they don’t show up in searches.) tags are somewhat better in that tags can have tags (hierarchical tags) but they also are not first class records. tags don’t match the concept of entity very well either.
as i’m sure you’re aware, in os x there is a standard solution for this : “bundles” or “packages”, which are just specially-marked folders that get treated like a single entity. they are easy to create (just make a folder and set the bundle bit) and in the finder they appear to be a single file. i’ve tried putting a bunch of pdfs into a single folder and setting the bundle bit, and importing that into eaglefiler. it appears as a single taggable record, which is great, however the internal pdfs do not get indexed (nor can you browse or preview them.)
i propose the following feature : in the absence of a more specialized importer (e.g. for skim documents), eaglefiler gets a new, “generic” bundle importer. the generic bundle importer will recursively index the contents of the bundle and add those keywords to the top-level bundle. there is a viewer for the bundle which allows for the contents of the bundle (which are just a folder hierarchy) to be browsed, and the individual files viewed.
there are additional features which may or may not be added. one might want to be able to separately reference and index the constituent documents. in the first proposal, as far as the indexer is concerned, the bundle is one big document. not sure what the right thing here is. also, it might be nice to be able to modify the bundle, to move things around, delete, add or take things in and out of the bundle. i haven’t thought in depth if there are any issues with nested bundles, though.
another option is, instead of a generic bundle importer, to create a special eaglefiler-bundle-type. the same features could be supported, and you could have more control over the format, and possible add Finder support (quick view.)
i think this is a relatively simple suggestion, which i think could be a powerful tool. i of course don’t know the implementation cost but i imagine it should not be terribly difficult.
this is just a suggestion and i’m curious about people’s thoughts on it.
best regards