Labels in Mac OS
Your post on colour tagging got me to thinking about labels in the Mac OS. For as long as I can remember (well at least system 7), Apple has provided the user with the ability to apply a coloured label to any file on the system.
By default, the labels are the colour names, but his can easily be changed in the finder preferences:
Once you set up your labels, it is a simple matter of applying it to a document through a contextual menu:
As you can see, the colour appears directly on the view of the file in the finder:
You can also use the colour/label as a search criteria:
Some limitations:
This is probably due to the limitations of our short term memory.
Not a huge deal, but I like to think I can customize everything
You cannot have contextual labels for element in particular locations. A subset of labels for my thesis, such as papers, presentations, projects, homework etc… is not possible.
While I wouldn’t call labels a rich form of tagging, it does offer rudimentary tagging to your file system.
of course, i remember that from my old mac days. i believe that UI is as old as Apple itself. I did a quick search for more info on them and didnt turn up a thing. I’d love to know how mac users make use of this feature, if at all. That may make an interesting usability study too.
Comment by draggin — February 27, 2006 @ 4:18 am