Punakea: Take Charge of your Files with Tagging
Now that we’re all settling in with Leopard and getting used to the “300+” innovations, it’s becoming painfully obvious that one innovation still lacking is a simple and convenient way to manage all the files lying around on your hard-drive.
Sure, you’ve got the improved Finder and Spotlight to work with, but wouldn’t it be nice if there was a magic word that could whisk you out of the Finder’s strict folder-based hierarchical structure?
Thanks to the fledging software developer nudge:nudge, there is. The magic word is “tagging” and the wand you can cast it with is their brand new, open-source file management solution called Punakea. Punakea is designed to complement Spotlight by giving you the option of assigning “tags” to any file. These tags act exactly the same way as their internet-based cousins do, and allow you to keep track of files across your system – even if they’re buried deep in different folders.
Not only that, but you can also add multiple tags to a single file – as many as you need. This allows you to create an intricate, yet intuitive array of interconnected files. Want to find every file you used to research that last presentation? No problem. Looking for all the pictures in your album taken by one particular camera? Easy. Trying to keep track of which documents are ready to publish on your blog and which are still in-progress? Punakea’s got you covered.
When it comes to simplifying the file-browsing experience, there are few applications out there that offer the elegance of Punakea’s tagging solution. And the best news is that, unlike its competition, Leap, it’s completely free. Now that you know the magic word, go pick up your copy of the wand over at Punakea’s website and take charge of your file system!
This is really a cool app. I was using it from the very beginning of the release. However, it cannot handle huge amount of files to tag at the moment. It’s crashing a lot so I stopped using it for the moment. But I am very much hopeful that there is a more stable release near. The development version is at 0.8. I am waiting for the 1.0 release. It really saves a lot of headache searching for files.
What’s the advantage of using this instead of the tagging action in Quicksilver?
I *love* Punakea. I’ve been using it to organize the 130+ hours of footage I took this last summer for a documentary. And it’s been amazingly helpful. I did a video here if anyone is curious how it works:
http://www.vimeo.com/441356
love it but find it to be a bit screwy sometimes – for example, trying to use it as a bookmark manager so i drop a url (drag) to dock, prompted for tags, save into punakea (file manager) and then it is NOT there…hmm
David: QuickSilver is undergoing a slow death and SpotMeta has not been updated since Leopard was released.
Punakea appears to be the frontrunner a free solution.