Windows should have an option to “tag” every file (much like blog posts), to allow a person to immediately rifle through and find every related and relevant file on one’s hard drive, wherever it might be stored.
A Life Worth Livingdiygamer
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The Nuance of Uncharted Character Designgamasutra.com.
Rock in His Pocket: Reading Shadow of the Colossusgamecareerguide.com.
Filling the Void Between Casual And Mainstream Gamesgamasutra.com.
Penumbra: Black Plagueparadox.
Repeating Chaosgame career guide.
Phantom Fingers: The Series – Part One: Echolocationgame set watch.
Focused Firegame set watch.
The News Game: Using Neverwinter Nights To Teach Journalismgamasutra.com.
The Wii That Wasn'tnext-gen.biz.
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I’ve found that people tend not to use half of the available character space in Windows filenames. Perhaps you could begin stuffing extra words into those.
Yet that would be wrong!
I think this is (or was) the guiding philosophy behind Longhorn/Vista. I don’t know if the development of that os has changed direction or not but there was talk once of doing away with folders. This annoys the hell out of me as I have yet to have an issue keeping my files straitened out.
Yeah, I wouldn’t want to do away with directories; that’s stupid, and something that still annoys me a little about Gmail. I want the option to file stuff, even if I don’t need to. Otherwise… head swimmy.
It’s actually in combination with a complex directory structure that tags would be most practical: you don’t really remember everything you’ve got on your system, and you want to quickly find everything that might have to do with X, Y, and Z. Instant cross-reference, and you turn up something you wrote six months ago that would be perfect and you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.
The pie-in-the-sky that was WinFS promised things along these lines (although perhaps not in those precise terms; “tagging” being a relatively new phenomenon), before it slowly died for its unfeasibility. I don’t know what abilities of this sort remain in Vista, but I doubt that it’s going to be (effective AND efficient/fast AND NOT annoying).
The current version of Mac OS X lets you insert “comments” text for any file at the filesystem level, which you can then search on using Spotlight. This is effectively what you are looking for, although I don’t know how smooth the whole operation is. I suspect that the out-of-the-box methods for inserting tags into the comment text is not as transparent or simple as it ought to be. In my experience, tagging is only useful if you have an in-your-face list of all the tags you’ve used in the past to ensure some form of consistency. I don’t think OS X natively provides this.
I’m told that one of the things BeOS users miss most about their dead operating system is how the filesystem supported the insertion/use of arbitrary metadata (and fast search on that) which allowed for all sorts of neat tricks.
Technically NTFS etc — most reasonably modern file systems — have the option to tag things with certain “attributes”. There’s little or no visibility for this at the UI level, however; you have to use random obscure tools with about a half-dozen command-line switches and/or GUIDs to get to that stuff.
This is just like how you can have separate file “streams” associated with a file… There can be the normal data that everyone knows about and gets when they open() the file, and alternate data that’s only even reported as being there if you know how to look…
In theory it probably wouldn’t be too hard to write an explorer extension that would support showing arbitrary comma-delimited tags in a separate column in explorer; you might even be able to get something that would search for them…
Maybe googling around for “NTFS custom attributes” or the like would be useful, in this regard.
Of course, you’d lose all your tags the instant you decided to burn something to a CD, or put it on a floppy, because of the filesystem difference…
If you right-click on a file in win2k or XP, you can go to the “summary” tab, and put keywords, comments and such in there.
I don’t know if you can search for that information, though… at least not with the built-in windows search
right-click and choose “properties” that is…
Oho!
I… imagine there might be a utility or plugin, to the latter end?