Flash video on tag2find.com (use Firefox)

For more information about it read the blog entry ‘tag2find next generations tagging‘

Stay tuned …

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.

So, what are our next steps for tag2find? After launching the first version of tag2find and receiving a lot of helpful feedback from users we decided to offer a download without subscription to make it easier for everyone to contribute.

In the meantime we designed the next generation of tag2find based on the world wide feedback and we also planned our network version which enables users to tag files on different PCs. This extended version will also include a network monitoring system for tagged files. It will increase productivity in workgroups. Here an example: Anna is working on a project with Tom. She is writing a report which she should hand to Tom once finished. Instead of telling him via email, telephone or at the next meeting, she tags the file with “projectname” and “report”. Tom uses the monitoring system of tag2find. He subscribes for those tags and as soon as Anna copies the file onto their shared folder, he will be automatically notified. Isn’t this a cool stuff?

For our next release we will again invite users from all around the world to join our testing program. But this time we would like to give something back to you. We plan to award users for their time they spend to improve tag2find. There will be little presents like t-shirt, polo shirts, etc. and we are also negotiating with a famous watch company to sponsor this program – see create your own watch face by laks.

That’s it for today. We plan on writing more about the exiting topic of tagging in the future as well as tell you about our lives here at tag2find office. Stay tuned for our next article

Here are some images from the new version.