Haven’t tried this myself, but a reader just pointed out SpotMeta, which extends the Mac OS X filesystem to include fully customizable metadata fields, presumably searchable by Spotlight.
Based on how OS X has progressively integrated some of the coolest features of BeOS, I predict that something similar to this will soon ship natively in the system. So I’m not exactly eager to start tacking on 3rd party extensions to the filesystem — yahweh knows how the two would interact when extensible metadata becomes “official.” But it’s cool to see people thinking in these terms.
Thanks David Richardson
Music: Coldcut :: Autumn Leaves
It’s one of the biggest letdowns about Tiger; uncustomisable MetaTags.
Although one of the biggest disappointments with BeOS’s MetaData was that you had to use something like TagsAndAttributes to Synchronise the MetaData with the File Data. People Files weren’t as portable as vCards.
If the File Metadata is stored independently to the File System Metadata, there needs to be a Daemon which goes around Syncing Metadata, whenever a file is accessed. This Same Daemon could also update the Search Index.