Where’s the Easy Access to Tagging in OS X?

On the web, we’ve been tagging everything for at least a couple of years now.

We tag bookmarks, photos, applications, blog posts, and on and on and on. I’ve written at length about streamlined ways to tag files within OS X, and lauded the great Default Folder X from St Clair Software for their efforts to form ‘tagging’ more accessible at the save screen. But still, we have yet to see any advances from Apple at the operating system level.

I was hoping against hope that day last year, that when I got Leopard (10.5) home and installed, I’d find some new ‘keyword’, or tagging support across the operating system. But obviously that dream came and went. With speculation that the next OS X iteration will be more or less hardening the system, and maintenance type enhancements, it doesn’t seem prudent to hold my breath for that release now, either.

I suppose the tried and true way of doing things (hierarchical folders housing documents that you have to

drill-down to find) continues to reign supreme. Is tagging at the operating system level just too ambiguous for users to grasp? My feeling is that whether it were made more accessible, a definite change would start to occur in the way humans accessed their hard-drive-based files. But I’ve been known to talk all wild and crazy before.

So riddle me that — Do you think tagging has a place at the operating system level? Clearly it has found a home on the web, but is it really suitable for use on a computer operating system with a myriad of files and file types? I’ve found use out of such a setup, but is the ‘old school’ way of doing things still best, and should it be left un-touched? Let’s build out your thoughts, as I’m really curious as to why the tagging methodology would sing on the web, but not on our own computer systems.

Orginal post by Nick Santilli