Originally downloaded January 27, 2007. This little app may be the reason SpotMeta, which I blogged about earlier today, just went open source and permanently free. Punakea has the same basic goal as SpotMeta, and it’s free. Still early in its development, Punakea already gets high marks from users at MacUpdate. Everything I said about SpotMeta would also be true of Punakea, and may the best Spotlight tagger win!
Update 4/6/07. I’ve tried using Punakea several times in the last couple of months, and at this point the tool appears to have not only stability problems but also some architectural flaws that make it fairly useless for me. Architecturally, Punakea is saddled with its use of the Finder comments field for storing tags, which simply isn’t as powerful or flexible as the support extended tagging Apple introduced in Mac OS X 10.4 (”Tiger”). Extended tags have been available on other Unix systems for years, and they support pretty much unlimited data types and sizes. I learned about them from reading the documentation on SpotMeta, which leverages that powerful framework for its tagging scheme. Unfortunately, SpotMeta’s development has now been abandoned, though its source code has been released for others to extend. There are really only one or two sticking points with SpotMeta, however, which I wish I knew enough Cocoa to fix. The other big flaw in Punakea is that it doesn’t let you tag folders… only files.
Here are a few notes I made on Punakea during testing:
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Cons |
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Punakea is being managed by a clearly thoughtful, forward-thinking development team, and it’s possible they will “see the light” one of these days, perhaps even use some of SpotMeta’s amazing code. Already, they have released a beta version of a new tagging framework that appears to store the tags in a repository outside of the files themselves. This is good news potentially, because one of the limitations of extended tags, it appears, is that they don’t survive when a given file is updated… for example, when a new application release is written over an older one. At least, I don’t know how to keep them alive in that circumstance, and clearly, you don’t want to have to create new tags every time you update a file!
Version as tested: 0.2.3.
