I leave town about once every two years without taking my notebook with me. Of course, this weekend was one of those weekends (can I hear you calling “Murphy” on this ?)…

Well, to sum it up shortly: once I got back, I analyzed the problem and it turned out the filesystem was beyond repair. So I set up a new virtual machine and restored from the last hourly backup before the crash. Everything is back online and there seems to be no data-loss in the forum and this blog. I apologize for the outage and for your inconvenience.

Here are some latest articles:

Englisch

Japanese

Indian

Czech

After our project lost funding, we tried to find alternatives. We had to take other projects and day-time-jobs in order to go on. These projects and jobs at the moment take away much of our time, unfortunately. As an additional burden, in our attempt to release tag2find as open-source, we need to convince our sponsors that it is “the right thing to do” and not throwing away invested money and development effort.

Third, tag2find is built upon various libraries, open-source and not-open-source ones, that play very nicely together in a closed-source scenario. As soon as you attempt to open-source your code, it becomes really stressfull. I never had imagined that releasing open-source code would be more painful regarding legal issues and licenses than releasing closed-source. Our already mentioned problems with our licensed art-work are playing into this as well…

So, to sum it up and answer the initial question from this blog post’s title: we guys are taking a small step after another in order to reach our goal. We continue and do not give up on tag2find, as we still believe it to be “a good thing”. We have great plans and would really like to have the resources (financial and time-related) to realize them.

We thank you all for your continued support, the fact that you, after all this time we kept you waiting are still bearing with us. It means a great lot to us! You are the reason we try to go on!

Softpedia also published  an extended review of tag2find. Thanks for the great work (this also goes to all the other bloggers that write about us!).

What has been accomplished up to now? Well. First: all websites and domains have been transferred to a server of mine, all is up and running (blog, website, forum).

Second, I started reviewing the code and libraries we used. It looks quite promising that we will be able to publish most of it under an open-source license. I am currently reviewing and investigating how to treat the situation where one cannot release some libraries under open-source but release the rest. I already contacted the FSF, but I hardly suspect they’ll write back because they for sure get lots and lots of such inquires and most of it should be covered by their FAQs and other documentation (remaining one problem: I am not a lawyer…).

So, this one is out, now we need to turn to more positive prospects: While financial support of tag2find development has ceased, we still managed to get all the rights to continue with development in our spare time. We still believe in tag2find and won’t let it down that easily.

So how will we go on from here? The negotiations regarding the financing have taken away most time of the last months, that’s one of the reasons why we are running behind schedule that far. The new situation will not really improve this. We want to personally apologize to all our faithful users who are still bearing with us. Thank you guys for all the motivation you are giving to us via our forum or via e-mail!

At the moment we have to arrange quite a few things, especially the changed financial situation requires us to devote plenty of our time to other projects in order to earn a living and to go on with tag2find development. Thus, development unfortunately will be delayed further, I’m afraid. But I will try to keep you more updated than we did in the last few months via this blog.

A possible nice outcome of this situation might be: we are evaluating our possibility to open-source tag2find! We cannot be certain yet and we have to figure out several licensing issues around this, but we are working on this as well. At the moment we are struggling to figure out if we have the rights to release all of the source-code and/or which license is suitable and can be applied to all our code and all the libraries we are using. Some libraries (especially some Microsoft libraries) prohibits to be released as part of GPL-licensed code, so we have to figure this out thoroughly.

Thanks again for bearing with us and thanks for your ongoing patience!

yes, we know we have been a little bit silent in the last few weeks…. ok, ok, I confess, months. I just wanted to jump in and calm all of you down who are worried about tag2find being alive. Yes, we are still here! We are focused on developing. tag2find NG is a very major rewrite, so it unfortunately takes some time. Just give us a little bit more time.

And thanks to all of you who have contacted us in the forum, the blog or via e-mail and offering your help. It is very much appreciated and we do all we can to deliver a product which has been worth waiting for!

So now you can subscribe our forum in your favorite feed-reader!

All the old forum data has been moved over to the new forum, therefore you should be able to login and post as normal. If you expect any problems, please let us know (send an contact@tag2find.com)! Thanks for your help.

Have fun!

For those of you we accidentally misplaced, please contact us at contact@tag2find.com.

So, first to say, “Next Generation” (or “NG”, as we also call it), is the direct result of all your feedback, with which you provided us over the first months after our initial Technical Preview release. This is the way how we want to realize all the feedback and great input you have given to us.

One of the most important changes is that we want to eliminate the “two-application behavior” of tag2find and bring a united, new and improved user interface. Up to now, tag2find was primarily either the Floating TagBox or the TagBrowser. Both are not really consistent and while both provide you with the same functionality, they behave differently and leave the feeling of two separate applications. Therefore we want to change this as one of the main improvements of “NG”. This will introduce several new features:

• Customizable Look & Feel: you can now arrange components of the user interface however you want, regroup them, detach them, etc.
• TagCloud: the TagCloud will have a more prominent position in the user interface. Those of you, who prefer a list-style will not be left alone, though. As you can configure your UI the way you want, you can simply hide the TagCloud and replace it with a list view of tags. Our tests here showed, however, that the TagCloud is an established tool for tag navigation and leads to very fast navigation through the tag space.
• Drag & Drop: D&D will become more important, you will be able to drop tags to files and easily modify existing tags of files with a view mouse clicks. It will be lightning fast and easy in comparison to the existing way of the TagBrowser.
• Improved Filemanagement: right now, file operations almost stopped at the application boundary of tag2find. You could launch items, you could drag&drop them to another location or e-mail, but that it was. This will change. In tag2find NG, there will be hardly any need to switch back to classic Windows Explorer any more.
• Improved Tag Management: we will greatly simplify the way to manage your tags. Wait and see!

Development of tag2find will take some time. Once we are ready, we will start a special tester program, where we will also reward our tester community for their efforts. Marc has already written a little bit about this.