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!

It seems that for some reason the update-notification could have caused a crash in versions prior to this one, so we recommend anyone to upgrade.

The 0.10.x series despite some usability issues is stable enough to be released to the “general public”. Therefore we have removed the requirement to subscribe in order to download tag2find. Please note, this is still a Technical Preview, there still are bugs and we still need you to get rid of them. Please help us make tag2find a better tool.

We are now working on an improved version of tag2find, regarding both user interface and functionality. This will take us some time but until then we will continue to support 0.10.x with bug-fix releases. The team is going to give you a glimpse of what is about to come in the next one or two weeks. Some information are already available from our “next-generation page” on our homepage. You are highly encouraged to comment on the new user-interface (either here or better in our forum).

Thank you all for your ongoing support. We really love to work with and for people like you. Any suggestions are as always also welcome in our forum.

What’s new

• New File Notification
• Drag & Drop out of the application
• Export and import of tags (basic backup functionality)
• Basic Tag-Suggestions
• Several dozens bug fixes regarding stability
• Several dozens of minur UI tweaks to enhance usability

Please let me give you a short description of our new major features.

New File Notification

One of the major problems with the usability of tag2find was the fact that you often forget to tag new files after you create them. You always had to search for the file on the harddisk, drag&drop them to the application or use the Explorer context menu to start tagging.

This is why we introduced the “New File Monitor”, which will watch certain folders (which you can define) for new files of a certain type (we provide you with a good set to start with). Whenever a new file is created in such a location, you will be notified by a small popup that there is a new file and you can now quickly and easily assign your tags to this file.

If you find such a popup to be too obstrusive, you can deactivate the automatic popup and tag2find will still notify you with a changed icon in the notification area (next to your clock in the taskbar). If you single-click with the left mouse-button (right for left-handed mouse-settings), the New File Monitor window will appear.

Export and Import of Tags

Many users have asked us how they can save their tags if they are going to set up their computer again or if they move over to a new computer. Up to this release, there has been no official and easy possibility to do this (we apologize for that!).

Now you can do the following to save and restore you precious tag information: open up a new TagBrowser and select “Export…” from the “File” menu. A wizard will guide you to exporting your tag information to an XML file. This file contains in plain text, which tags are applied to which file. If you copy this file over to a new computer, you can then chose “Import…” and chose the XML file for importing files. It will load all tags from the XML file and display an edit view with all found files and the loaded tags. If you chose “Save”, the tags will be added to those files.

Please note, that for importing tags the files need to be at the same path as they were when exporting the tags. We will work on this in later releases to allow more flexibility here.

Extended Drag & Drop

You can now not only drag files into tag2find, you can also drag them out of the search result popup or the TagBrowser. If you drag files over to explorer, the files will be moved/copied. If you drag them to your e-mail composer window, they will be attached to the mail. If you drag & drop them to an open application, most applications will open the file you drop.

The behavior is the same as from Windows Explorer, so anything you can do with drag & drop from Explorer, you can now also do from tag2find!

Basic Tag-Suggestions

When installing tag2find for the first time, the most amount of work goes into building your own tag world. To aid you in this task, we now provide a wizard which will provide you with initial tag suggestions. After installation, it will automatically open tag2find to guide you through a basic tagging for your files. At the moment, we are at the beginning for providing those suggestions and will continue to put effort into development to get smart suggestions.

This version provides suggestions based on

• folder path: often existing path names can also be used as tags, so this can get help you get started
• file names: based on the filename, the type of the file is determined and tags for music, documents, images, etc. are suggested
• metadata: MP3 files already contain metadata, called ID3; this data is extracted and suggested as tags

You can start the wizard at any time by selecting “File” -> “Add Files from” -> “Directories”.

Other Changes

Many users have justifiably complained about the “Service updating database…” notification which was way to obtrusive. We removed this notification as a whole and just change the icon in the notification area (next to the clock in the taskbar) to indicate this. If you disabled the notification in the settings, not even this change of icon will happen.

What’s next?

We will now turn to the long-promised re-design. We will try to integrate all the very precious feedback you gave us over the last several weeks.

One big part will also address problems reported to us, especially the performance of the file tracking algorithm we developed and its unhappy coexistence with some anti-virus programs. We will work on the memory- and CPU footprint of the tag2find service and the UI.

Another major part will be a complete redesign of the user interface. We have some quite cool ideas for making tag2find a cool, clean, fast, and easy-to-use application. We will go back to the scratch-board and starting painting again. This will take some time, but be assured we will keep you informed about our progress.

We’d further once more like to express our gratitude for being such a wonderful group of testers and for providing us with such invaluable feedback. Without you all we’d be stuck and could not go on. We hope you’ll stay with us until the next version comes out and we are sure you’ll see that it was worth waiting for it.

Thank you all for your patience!

• Initialize tagging
• Drag & drop to external applications
• New file monitoring

Launch time is planned on Monday/Tuesday next week.

As promised, we will now also approve the next bunch of users for the technical preview program. Due to the unexpected high number of requests, it can take some time to approve you all. Thank you for your patience.

I hope you stay with us and help us further improve tag2find. Considering the upcoming features for v0.10, which we expect to publish end of January, I’m sure it’s worth it.

As 0.8.0.3 is our first release available to our members, let me give you a short introduction what you are about to get. This release offers you:

• Full tagging of files on local volumes that are formated using the NTFS volume, including detection of renames, copies, etc.,
• integration with Windows Explorer & Internet Explorer,
• an decent Floating TagBox that is always handy available on your desktop if you want to search or tag,
• image preview,
• an embedded Windows Media Player for playing your music and videos,
• your own personal TagCloud,
• and lots of powerful tools to easily manipulate your tags,
• and even more

If that got you interested (and I’m quite sure it did), and you want to be able to get the well known power of tagging from the web right to your desktop, I recommend you taking a look at our features and the tour.

Please keep in mind, this is the first release of the “technical preview” release. We worked really hard to deliver a stable and very useful first beta version, but we need your help to sort things out. Please join us in our forum or write us comments here, as soon as you have experience with our product.

So, that’s all for now. Most of the developers will now start their well-earned X-mas Holidays, so please be gentle and allow some days response time to requests and answers. The team will be back in full strength on January 3rd, 2007. And I hope to read some nice comments here

Wish you all a nice X-mas and a Happy New Year & a lot of fun tagging your digital world with tag2find. I’m off of the office now