If your copy of TagBot is set to check for updates automatically, then within seven days TagBot will figure out on its own that an update is available and ask you if you'd like to download it. If you don't have between 0 and 7 days to wait, though, you can go to the Robot menu and select "Check For Updates Now...". Either way, let us know if you experience any irregularities with either the update process or the behavior of TagBot thereafter.

Just to be clear, this isn't dangerous. No permanent damage is being done to your data, your tags, or your system - the query functionality just isn't working.

On the other hand, Leopard looks like it's going to help make our tagging experience better in a couple of ways. Spotlight searches have been made faster and more robust, which TagBot will benefit directly from since it uses Spotlight to find your tagged files. Also, any delays in popping up a contextual menu in the Finder that you may have seen should go away due to a change in the way the Finder handles our contextual menu plugin.

And those are just what we get for free, before Pete and I have had the chance to really make TagBot take advantage of the new system's technology improvements.

So when will TagBot be fully compatible with Leopard? Pete and I hope to be able to release a version 1.1.1 update within a week that'll fix TagBot's querying capabilities. In the meantime, feel free to keep using TagBot to apply your tags to files, and you can use Spotlight's query field to search for your tagged files using the "&tagname" syntax. That's all safe and effective.

Finally, Pete and I would like to congratulate everyone at Apple who worked to make Leopard the best update of the best operating system we've ever seen. An incredible amount of work went into Leopard, and as users, Pete and I say "Thanks!".

The truth is, Pete and I have been hard at work on the new Harry Potter movie. You may have heard otherwise, but Pete and I are actually writing, filming, directing, and starring in the latest Potter motion picture. Naturally, I play the part of Harry and Pete plays the part of Hermione. This keeps us very, very busy. I mean REALLY busy.

Of course, I had to move to California for this to happen, which is where I was last week. Now that Pete and I are in the same state, we hope to be able to make better progress on the movie, which will free up more time for us to work on Big Robot initiatives such as Operation Respond To Mail and Operation Make TagBot More Rad.

So please bear with us while we get back into the swing of things after my move to ever-sunny CA, and as we work feverishly to finish up HPatOotP. Thanks and cheers.

If you want to see which tags have been applied to a file, just right-click on the file and look at the list of tags in the Remove Tag submenu. That submenu is a list of only the tags that have been applied to the selected file. We think this makes sense, given that you can't remove a tag that hasn't been applied already.

If you haven't applied any tags to the file yet, the Remove Tag submenu won't be there. And if you select multiple files and right-click on them, the Remove Tag submenu will show a list of all the tags that have been applied to any of the selected files. It's a pretty quick and handy way to see what you've already got going on.

This has been pretty fun - we should do it more often. If there are more questions that you'd like to see us answer here, send us email: support_bot@bigrobotsoftware.com.

We're psyched. Making a great product is definitely 80% of the battle, but getting the word out is the other 80%. That's a lot of battle. And if you're relying solely on word-of-mouth because the marketing department keeps drinking their budget, things like this make a huge difference. Thanks TUAW!

Version 1.1 of TagBot started life as a minor bug fix release, but as you can see from the release notes we overshot that mark. Not only did we fix a couple of critical bugs, but we added a bunch of new features as well. 1.1 is shaping up to be the best version of TagBot yet.

We fixed two major bugs this release - Unicode handling and plugin installation. We fixed some Unicode issues with version 1.01, but we still had some Unicode-related crashes floating around. Ryan tackled the Unicode issue and from what I hear it nearly killed him. (Maybe Ryan will blog about that at some point). But his valiant efforts have paid off and TagBot is now more stable than ever and it can handle any character you throw at it.

I worked on the automatic plugin installation, which we first added in version 1.01. Unfortunately the plugin installer didn't work if you were running with a non-admin account, which is not cool. So I made it my mission to make sure the plugin installer runs as smooth as butter. Or something else that is really smooth - my wife wants me to cut back on the fat.

Among all the bug fixing we managed to add some new features as well. One feature that is immediately obvious is the tag count. Each tag in the TagBot palette now has a live count next to it. The tag count keeps track of the number of files each tag is applied to. I love the fact that the tag count is live: the moment you apply a tag the count updates immediately. This type of feedback really improves the tagging experience. I honestly wasn't sure I would like this feature when we starting working on it, but now I can't imagine TagBot without it.

But my very favorite new feature is the improved keyboard interaction. Once you have the tag palette active you can start typing the name of a tag and TagBot will highlight it. This is a feature that several of our customers have requested to better manage their large list of tags. Once you have a tag highlighted you can now hit Command-O to view the tagged files. I find I am able to work more efficiently with TagBot now.

I don't have time to mention all the new features - I have to go sweep up all the confetti from the release party. While I am doing that, you should download TagBot 1.1 and try out the new features for yourself. Tagging your files just got even easier.

When you tag a file, you're just associating a word with that file, like a category. You're not changing the content of the file, but you're adding some extra information to what the operating system knows about it. And you can associate multiple tags with each file.

Once you've tagged some files, TagBot can call up your files according to the tags you've tagged them with, lickety-split. That's where the value of tagging lies: it's a way to categorize your files and fetch them according to your categories, regardless of which directory they live in, and whether you've moved them around.

A Metaphor, If You Will

Think of it this way... Pretend that instead of a computer, you've got a filing cabinet. In that filing cabinet you have all your documents in their folders, in various drawers. So right now you know two things about each file: you know in which drawer and which folder it lives, and you know what each file contains. Well, you probably at least have a rough idea, anyway.

But one day you get the great idea to make up some stickers, each with a single word on them. You use words like "important", and "favorite". You take the stickers you've made, and you stick them on your documents. So now you know three things about each file: its location, its contents, and one or more categories that you've applied to it.

That's all well and good, but it's about to get better. Because *poof*, now you also have a robot. This robot has the singular ability to rifle through all the files in your filing cabinet and retrieve for you all the files with a given tag or set of tags applied to them.

Between the tags that you've applied to your files, and the ability of this robot to retrieve your files based on their tags, you've got a great new way to organize your stuff. Without changing the contents of a file or the drawer and folder that you keep a file in, you can change the tags that you've stuck on your file. And you can access your files according to their tags really quickly. So now, you find that you can get all of your important files with the press of a button. The same goes for your favorite files, and your urgent files, and so on. You can even get all your urgent and important files in one shot, by asking the robot to get all your files having both tags.

Back to Your Computer

This is really powerful stuff. Because you can change where you keep a file, and the tag will stay with it, so the robot can find it no matter where you put it. You can stick as many tags as you like on a file, and you can use these tags on any type of file, regardless of whether they're a Word document, or a photo, or a music file, or a Safari bookmark, or whatever. Anything that is a file can be tagged, and anything that is tagged can be retrieved really quickly by TagBot. And of course, all it takes to tag a file is to drag it onto a tag in TagBot, or to right-click it and select the tag you want to add from a list. So it's easy to download TagBot and start tagging your files immediately.

Did I mention that it's free to use for as long as you want with up to six tags, and a full license for use with unlimited tags is only $20 USD? :)

Anyway, so when we talk about "file tagging", that's what we mean. That's what TagBot does. It lets you set up a list of tags, and then makes it super fast and easy to tag your files and retrieve them by tag. It does this without altering the actual contents of the file, and it works with anything that can be saved as a file on your hard drive. It's a new way of organizing your files that fits in with your existing organization system without changing anything.

It's especially great for anyone who deals with a lot of files, or even just anyone who doesn't like to bother to set up lots of folders and be careful about where you put things. With TagBot, it doesn't matter where you put that file; you can just tag it and forget it. Let TagBot find it for you later.

Try TagBot Now

But again, like Daniel, we're not condoning or legitimizing piracy, we're just saying that for a small company in our situation, it's probably not the worst thing that could happen. The worst thing that could happen would probably be if no one were interested in our software, in which case we wouldn't have to worry too much about people stealing it anyway.

Anyway, what we wanted to add to the discussion is that we actually think it's important to put the needs of the legitimate customer before our desire to prevent illegitimate customers from using the software. That is to say, protecting software from piracy is important, but no anti-piracy measure should interefere with the user expierience, or the ability of legitimate users to use the license they've purchased. There are probably some developers who feel they've been burned by piracy more than we have, and so they may disagree, but that's where we stand right now, and for the foreseeable future.

Case in point: Big Robot uses our own licensing system for our products, which we call LicenseBot. LicenseBot will let a user easily export and import their license as a file, making it trivial for them to back up their license in the same way they would back up their documents. Now, if a person wanted to, they could export their license as a file and share it with their friends. There's a social barrier to doing this, because the name and email address of the licensee is embedded in the license file, so anyone else who uses that file will get the original licensee's name and email address, but this is by no means a technical hurdle.

Our view is that what's going to benefit the software ecosystem the most is trust and reciprocity. As developers, we can add trust by not making anti-piracy measures that get in the way of the user experience. And users can reciprocate by purchasing a license if they like the product, and encouraging others who like the product to do the same. That's how the software ecosystem can be made stronger, and that benefits everybody.

Nick Santilli has been a really cool supporter of pretty much all things Big Robot since we first released Meta, and we had a great time with him in this interview.

Thanks Nick!

We'll be trying to keep this blog active, though it may languish now and then when we're deep in some development activities. But generally we'll try to use this blog to talk about what's going on with our products, things we've battled and dealt with while developing software, and as a place to respond to those discussions that circulate the Infernet about what it's like to have a tiny software indie software company.

Not that we're big and important and our opinions have any weight yet or anything. But that probably won't stop us from shooting off our mouths.