I’ve spent some time exploring how best to take advantage of OS X 10.4’s metadata goodness, familiarizing myself with the new ways in which Spotlight lets you organize files.

I’ve long looked forward to finally being able to use all file attributes to organize my files, rather than just the location attribute. Previously, both in Windows and Mac OS, you could do searches on a limited set of such attributes, like “date created” or “file size”In the Mac OS, there was even a highly rudimentary user-adjustable file attribute you could search with: the color label.. But you could never turn such searches into a permanent filtered window, dynamically showing all the files on your system whose attributes satisfy your criteria.

Mac OS X 10.4 lets you do precisely that, using “Smart Folders”. Now, a file can show up wherever and whenever it is relevant, as determined by its metadata. Apple has made it even better by greatly increasing the different kinds of attributes a file can possess, and also by indexing text-based files, in effect turning content into a (giant) attributeUntil now, I had to resort to BBEdit’s ability to search through the content of multiple files to do something remotely resembling this..

But alas, Spotlight has its limits. Two in particular are identified by John Sircusa in his scarily thorough and much linked-to Ars Technica review of OS X 10.4:

1) Just as I have encountered with the smart folders in iTunes and RSS readers, Spotlight’s user interface severely limits the kind of search query it lets you make. Specifically, all individual queries can only be strung together via logical ANDs. No nests, ORs, or NOTs.

2) Although the underlying BSD operating system now supports it, there is not yet any higher level support for creating your own arbitrary searchable attribute=value pairs, which is precisely what I had been hoping to do to my data — for example by marking up a file thus: “client=si, projectname=designåret, language=english, duedate=20050530, function=invoice”. I would then have been able to group together files in smart folders by client, as well as by projects that are due within a week, and by invoices for the year, come tax time. No longer would I have to choose only one of those methods of viewing my data. I could have it all. But just not yet, it would seem.

But there are workarounds.

Re 1): It turns out that while the Spotlight user interface doesn’t help you structure complex queries, it does give you a way to perform raw queries, just as you would at the command line. While these aren’t pretty, they certainly let you construct as complex a query as you care to make. Restiffbard explains how exactly. There is a picture at the end of the post making it all a bit clearer.

Re 2): Several blogs have noticed that there is a new attribute called “Spotlight Comments” that is visible if you “Get Info” (Command-I) on a file. This attribute provides a text field that is usable in Spotlight searches — for example, you can group together all files whose Spotlight comments contain the word “Polish”.

Spotlight comments has now been mooted by blogger Russell Beattie as a great way of attaching keywords, or “tags”, to files, perhaps because tags are all the rage on the internets right now.

I happen to think that tags are way too shoddy to trust. How would you know if “polish” refers to the people, the language, your shoes or the need for an edit? Smart folders are not so smart that they can tell the difference. This is why it is so important to have attribute=value pairs, making sure that names of attributes are unique.

The “folksonomies” of tags that are used by Technorati and Flickr don’t escape this problem. They too suffer from contextual confusion, especially of the linguistic kind — for example, Swedes will tag pictures of children with “barn”, leaving it to Americans to wonder why their searches for images of a pictoresque barn brings up blond children. The idea is that folksonomies are good enough, and perhaps on the web they are, trading accuracy for spontaneity, but for my own files I need not make such compromises.

Therefore, I think we should go one better than tags and use Spotlight comments as an adhoc repository for our own arbitrary attribute=value pairs. To minimize the potential for contextual confusion, mine are going to look like this:

:client=si: :projectname=designåret:

:language=english: :duedate=20050530:

:function=invoice:

It is far easier to add such metadata than it might look, thanks to the new Automator workflows, which can batch-process files. It’s a trivial matter to create a workflow [.zip] that appends text to the Spotlight comments of selected files and folders (and even nested files and folders [.zip]), as several blogs have done. Just open these workflows in Automator, then save them as Finder plug-ins. To use, select files and/or folders, right-click, and select your workflow of choice. A dialogue then prompts you for the text to append.

It goes without saying that this is a rather rudimentary workaround. For starters, there is no trivial way to batch-change or batch-delete arbitrary text from Spotlight comments (that I have seen — Automator certainly doesn’t provide it), for example by peforming a search and replace on the Spotlight comments of a selection of files. It should be fairly easy to do this in AppleScript, though, given sufficient motivation. It’s a problem that those who plan to use tags face as well.

Eventually, either Apple or a third party will implement OS X 10.4’s built-in support for user-defined attributes, making this ad hoc solution thoroughly obsolete. But when this does happen, it should be trivial to switch to the new and proper menthod, because all you will need to do is select all the items in a smart folder, which already match your predefined criteria, and batch-process them to generate the proper attribute=value pairs.

In the meantime, there is an opportunity here for the right company to create the Conflict Catcher of OS XContext for recent switchers: Conflict Catcher was an indispensable utility for OS 9.. Right now, I wish I were a proper programmer.

Because it’s the run-up to Bloggforum 2.0, I once again feel at liberty to indulge in shameless metablogging. Consider this some early personal notes for the panel discussion, “Blogging, what’s the point?”A good friend complained last week, “You used to write funny stories about Swedes. Now your blog is just about numbers,” the implication being, I’m guessing here, that Swedes are more interesting than numbers.

It’s true that Swedes are funnier, but they’re no longer new. From September 2002, when I first arrived in Stockholm, until about September 2004, Sweden was an exotic place — beautiful and efficient on the surface, though with a full complement of quirks and perplexities that were a pleasure to root out and drape across my blog.

Expat blogging was possible for as long as Swedes were them and I was me. But now these identities have begun to blur. Not so much in the abstract, nationalist sense (I’m a dedicated post-nationalist), but on the level of daily personal interactions. Speaking everyday Swedish is now semi-automatic; and paying Swedish taxes has led to a steady erosion of my traditional ironic detachment when contemplating local political shenanigans and judicial cock-ups. If I’m paying for my stake in Swedish society, and I can’t vote here, then I’ll damn well blog here, goes the thinking.

So the cutesy expat phase of this blog is definitely overI’m afraid we’ll never know what it was that I hated most about Stockholm., replaced by a more haranguing tone when blogging Sweden (usually because it tends to concern group think, civil liberties, and freedom of speech). But that’s not the first time my interests have shifted. There was a phase in 2002 when I wrote often about about Israel and Palestine. Ditto about the Iraq war in 2003. And yes, now, number theory.

I have an admiration for one-issue bloggers who have the convictions to harp on about the same theme day-in day-out, but I find myself visiting such blogs less frequently after a while, because variations on a theme inevitably prove less attractive than whole new themes. I myself blog to learn, as a means of thinking through and then articulating a coalescing world view that I try to make as consistent as possible before it solidifies. But then I need to move on, otherwise I get repetitious, bored and hence boring.

In the end, it boils down to this: I don’t want to blog from a position of authority; I want to blog from a position of discovery. I think that is the secret of the relative longevity of this particular blog — it is driven by my inconstant interests. Fortunately, these interests on occasion intersect with those of readers.

Well, the podcasting bug has finally bitten, late but hard. I’m currently addicted to the BBCs In Our Time and CBCs Quirks and Quarks, and several NPR shows. My commute to work has become far more enriching in the process. It’s like getting an few extra free lectures in history or science per week. Here’s hoping the effect will show over time.

My initial critical stance towards podcasting as a revolutionary force will therefore need revision. The following things are still true, however:

Unless new technology comes along (such as better voice to text), podcasts will remain opaque to the increasingly important pervasive search abilities of operating systems (well, my operating system) and Google. Podcasts won’t show up in searches based on what is inside them, unless you were to annotate or transcribe them, which is a nuisance. (But then again, we tend to annotate or tag pictures, don’t we?) This will continue to limit their efficiency as a searchable store of knowledgeI have also been skeptical of tagging as a meme. Why do something manually that Google does better automatically? For podcasts, however, it may be the best option for now, as it may be for pictures..

Podcasts are terrible unless they’re by people who know what they are talking about. That is also the case for text blogs, of course, but the cost of realizing that a blog is terrible is much lower in terms of time and effort than realizing a podcaster is terrible.

Furthermore, podcasts are useless unless they are the best medium for the message. If you aren’t blind, visually scanning text will always be a far faster method of soaking up informationThe blind can also use text-to-speech, or have the results of text searches read out to them., so podcasts need to exploit their limited competitive advantage. Podcasts work for interviews, lectures, comedy shows or learned debate, where the timeliness of the delivery is not so critical and the cost of transcribing the voices outstrips the value added from doing so. In other words, podcasts work for the delivery of natively oral niche discourses free from newscycle pressures.

In other cases, such as with comedy, the very nature of the delivery adds value, so podcasts of the BBC’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy shows would obviously be far preferable to the script.

For several years now, streaming on-demand delivery of radio programs via the interneet has complemented radio delivery by making them available A) anywhere in the world you have internet access, and B) whenever you want. Podcasts further improve on A) by letting you hear them anywhere, period.

I think the advantage of letting you take your on-demand audio that extra mile has yet to be fully exploited. When it is, there will be many more uses in the vein of architectural walking tours through cities, much as how museums today use audio devices to aid romps through exhibitions.

I’m less optimistic about the idea that podcasts of “working-class” rallies and meetings will somehow raise class consciousness among those who ostensibly don’t read (to reply to Mark Comerford’s podcast manifesto). That’s because the added value of such meetings comes from actual participation — the sense of belonging to something larger, and the fact that these meetings sometimes serve as decision-making opportunities. Listening to after-the-fact podcasts, on the other hand, is just as solitary an experience as reading or writing, and is not going to change the results of these meetings. You had to be there, so to speak. So to speak (haha).

(Not to mention that I believe the idea of class consciousness is no longer relevant. Class-based movements used to be a response to a lack of opportunities for social mobility in society. Ironically, labor movements today are trying to resist such mobility, favoring the protection of uncompetitive manufacturing jobs over retraining for jobs that have a much better competitive future. I put this down to a self-preservationist impulse on the part of labor unions, and the difficulty of letting go of mental constructs past their use-by date.)

Oh this is precious. John Hobbs over at Cinema Volta has concocted a Dashboard widget that gives you the GPS-derived ETA, in minutes, for the next blue bus at your local stop, much in the same way Stockholm’s high-tech busstops do. I took his widget and chose my own two stops, using the codes in the html of this page. (You might need a free trial version of BBEdit 8 to do this.) So here is my very own first (entirely plagiarized) widget. If they’re that easy to make, I take everything back I said about Dashboard yesterday, and I think I have just put another project on my to-do list.

So this is what happens when post lengths keep on getting longer while blogging opportunities hit a period of work-induced scarcity: Not much. What’s more, the time allotted to blogging matters has been taken up by non-literary pursuits that will bear fruit soon, though not quite yet.

In the meantime, I thought I’d try a revolutionary new idea. Short blog posts! Here we go…

Item! Yes, I stood in line with the geeks and bought myself a copy of Mac OS X 10.4 a few hours ago so I could spend my Friday evening installing it. Luckily, I was doing it as a public service so I could blog it for you all, and not for my own enjoyment.

First impression: Amazing, and not even for its two most anticipated features. I have yet to use Spotlight (the search function that I fully expect will forever change my relationship to my data) because it will take hours to index my files. And I am underwhelmed by Dashboard, the undeniably pretty eyecandy that lets you drop widgety mini programs all over your screen, because you can.

So the gripes first. The default Dashboard widgets are not all that well thought out. There is a dictionary widget, but you can’t copy the results of your search to the clipboard. This gets even sillier when you find out there is a stand-alone dictionary application outside Dashboard that does exactly the same thing, except that here you can copy/paste, and that — unlike with the widget — you can keep it open next to your other applications, where it is useful.

The same goes for the calculator: There is a castrated version in Dashboard, and then there is a newly beefed up standalone version that includes a brand new mode (standard, scientific and now programmer).

So I guess I don’t “get” Dashboard, but no doubt before long there will be plenty of pretty things you can do with it. Come to think of it, my parents will probably love it. It is undeniably simple, conceptually. (And by that I’m not implying that my parents are.)

On to the cool things. iChat now lets you use the Jabber protocol, so you can set up an account that lets you talk to MSN Messenger people. The ability to show iChat buddies what song or radio station you are currently listening to is now built in, with the added clever “feature” that you can click directly through to the song in the iTunes store. Sneaky.

Safari’s RSS-reading ability is no replacement for the power-user features I like in NetNewsWire 2, but again, it makes RSS look extremely simple, and I predict this will finally lead to mass-utilization of RSS as a content consumption method. My parents don’t currently use RSS. They will after they get their hands on this browser.

This focus on RSS gets leveraged in a luscious new screen saver, where the feeds get visualized as floating text snippets. It’s a new favourite for staring at.

Automator, a GUI for AppleScript, sort of, finally provides simplicity where I’ve always wished things were simpler in the Mac OS, and I think I will find myself using it very often. BBEdit just today was upgraded to support it, and in conjunction with Mail and Spotlight and smart folders I can already see some possibilities. For example, if I were to write a PHP script that lets people RSVP on the web and which then sends the information via email, I could use my inbox as a sophisticated triage system, and then use BBEdit’s text-handling prowess to collate the responses into a single snug text file. However often I want.

But by far the most impressive thing in OS X is the return of the Graphing Calculator, now called Grapher. Apple hides it in the Utilities folder. It’s a real jawdropper, and simply gorgeous to look at. It lets you do all manner of fancy mathematical manipulation on equations (integrate, differentiate, find roots) and then graph the results in rotating 3D. Far too much to recount, so I’ll just leave you with a screen shot.

That wasn’t exactly a short post, though, was it?