After we were fighting with our old forum software we decided to switch to Simple Machines Forum. The new forum runs with higher performance and offers several new features, most importantly an RSS feed for the forum!

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!

It is so amazing how time pass that fast! I am already 9 months working at tag2find. I really feel very lucky because I have been in this project from the beginning and saw the improvements that the tool is experimenting day by day thanks to the contribution of the great feedbacks of our users and of course the fantastic work that my colleagues are doing! Now I feel anxious to see what is going to happen with our Next Generation and definitely I will follow the process even if I would not be at the office… it will be a small break for me and actually I think I need it because after been working in a Software park now I am starting to be a computer addict!!! I wish a nice summer for everybody and hope we can see soon Tschüss!!!

Since we went online (right after Christmas 06) we received soooo much support from you, the users and a lot of news were written about tag2find on different websites. We are proud to present a map of all the different websites around the world who have expressed their opinion, given us feedback and critics and support our ongoing development. See how tag2find goes around the world.

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

Austria has it’s own Superbowl it is called the Austrian Bowl XXIII and was played last Saturday in Vienna. On that day the number one ranked European (American) Football team, Vienna Vikings, played against the Graz Giants in front of 6.000 people + tag2find crew. The game was only close at the first half. After that the Vikings offense machineries got started and they won the Austrian Bowl 42:14. At this night game we had a lot of fun and it took us two days to recover from fan cheering

Here some impressions from that game:

We have just published our maintenance release 0.10.2.5 (download).

In this release we fixed a lot of small bugs. Our 0.10 line is still supported for bug fixing, but major improvements will be added to the “Next-Generation” version.

New and noteworthy:

• Support for 120 dpi screen resolution (see also related article).
• The tag2find Windows Explorer context menu handler was not installed on all computers.
• Plugging in external NTFS-formatted USB devices did not add the volume name (i.e. “E:\”) to the filenames.
• .OGG is now in the lists of media files, allowing playback from the integrated Windows Media Player if the OGG codec is installed.
• Fixed a crash on startup if Windows Media Player was not installed on the system.
• Thumbnail preview of PDF files (if Adobe PDF IExtractImage Filter is installe, i.e. Adobe Reader is installed).
• Added “Check for Update” to notify icon context menu and “Help” menu in TagBrowser.
• The “Add Files Wizard” now allows specification of which files to import based on the file extensions (forum request).
• Several startup exceptions and fixes for hibernation problems (sorry, we could not eliminate all of them at the moment).

Technical Preview
We just want to remind you that this is still “Technical Preview”. tag2find became quite popular over the last time (and we really appreciate it, thank you folks!) and people expect performance we cannot deliver for the current release. Please stay patient with us, we will keep up working on it. Our main goal at the moment is to improve the usability, that’s what the “Next Generation” is about. We will then look into the performance issues.

Once more, thank you all for your great support!

We spent the last few days resolving an issue which we never realized we had: support for “large fonts” setting, i.e. resolution other than 96dpi. Today more and more users are switching to 120dpi because even small notebooks have very high screen resolution and reading a small font on a small screen is not very comfortable.

Unfortunately, we never tested tag2find in other resolution settings than the default, primarily because we personally did not have a need for it. We came around this when we realized that the Configuration Wizard bug reported to us several times was directly linked to the selected font resolution. Once we switched, we got a shock: tag2find was unusable at settings other than 96dpi. The user interface was completely broken and several components were inaccessible because they were not drawn at all…

One should think that Microsoft .NET provides some support here… Well, it does, but unfortunately central parts of its layouting engine only work reliably if you work at 96dpi. After almost three days of development we finally made it to get the UI working for modes other than 96dpi, almost without glitches. Some final issues need to be resolved, then we are going to publish a new version with the fixes included.

If you followed our website, our forum, and this blog for the last view weeks, you will have seen a lot of hints to “Next Generation”. You may have wondered what this buzz is all about. Well, this article will give you a brief overview and why we here at tag2find are so enthusiastic about it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Three months have already passed and now it’s time to go back… Living in Austria was calmer and quiet for me comparing to Greece where everyone speaks loudly, drive nervously and take every action in ‘high speed mode’!

It is a great experience to live for some time in a foreign country, you can see some things from a different point of view and it would be even easier for me if I could speak German as well!

My life here at tag2find was also a valuable experience. One important thing that will remain in my mind is that if I want to have success in my professional life I should do something that I love. These people really love what they do and I guess this is the greatest motivation for them and represents one of the main reasons for tag2find success as well.

I want to say ‘thank you’ and wish the best to all of you. Hope to meet you again and…Yannella! - I wish I could be your ‘mahlzeit company’ from distance !

Yesterday, our intern Sebastian Putscher had a breakthrough in prototyping FAT32 support. He was able to implement a basic FAT32 file-tracking algorithm which was able to reliably detect copies, renames and movements of files on a volume. What’s also working now is detection of copies between NTFS and FAT32 volumes.

The developed code is still in an early stage and by far not suitable for release, but it is a great breakthrough. I personally want to congratulate Sebastian for his success! The developed prototype now needs to be transformed into release-quality code, especially regarding CPU, memory and I/O load. This will take some time, but as you can see, we are clearly on the track.

So, why is FAT32 support that important? Well, because most external devices (USB memory sticks, SD-cards, just to name two) are formatted with FAT32 and not NTFS. Of course our goal here at tag2find is also to support those external media and support for FAT32 is important.

So, you may ask, why is FAT32 support so difficult to implement? As I have pointed out in some forum posts, the main problem is that there is no way of sticking additional data to FAT32 files. So we cannot reliably identify files once they are copied or moved around. For us, tag2find is not only a tool for finding things in a static environment, where files are left in the same place once they are tagged. We strongly believe, that the main advantage of tag2find is that you become independent of the location and name of a file. So for us it is important that we can track files as they move around and reflect those changes in realtime when performing a search.

A very basic approach where tags do not stick to a file, and the tags are lost once a file is renamed, moved, or copied could be implemented very fast. We don’t believe it is sensible, though. Tell us, if we are wrong!

We made it! Today, a famous watch company from Vienna, called LAKS, will support our beta testing program for the next generation. Now, next generation’s testers will have the possibility to create and receive their personal watch. We plan to start this program in the summer time and we will keep you up-to-date.

To see how this will work, have a look at mywatchface.com

Like we said, we would like to give you something back for the time and effort you spend by improving tag2find.