Tag Clouds everywhere (Nifty Box 1.1)

I am proud to announce, that finally Nifty Box 1.1 is ready and will be released next week (if all goes to plan). Version 1.1 will not only feature Spotlight export, but it will also include tag clouds and a hierarchical tag organisation.

One reason I wrote Nifty Box was, that I thought a hierarchical file structure, where every file has to be put into a tree-like folder/directory path, should be a thing of the past. Tags could be a good way to "put" a file into more than one category. But a pure flat tag organization might throw away useful information about the relationship between the tags/categories. So now NB 1.1 will feature tag folders: you put the tags into a hierarchical tree (if you want to), but not the files. So you can construct a tree like "Science -> Space -> Mars", where "Science" and "Space" are folders and "Mars" is the actual tag. If you then select for example "Science" Nifty Box will show you all items, that have a tag from the "Science" tree. More or less this works like folders and playlists in iTunes.

But this is just organization, now the visualization: Everyone who uses tags knows that after some time the number of tags grows quite fast and browsing them in a list can be quite confusing. Therefore some wise people have created the so called tag clouds, which were one ingredient of web 2.0 right from the beginning. Now - to help you managing your tags - Nifty Box will also feature tag clouds in the tag tree. This is how it will look like:

But if you are confused by all these clouds and don't like modern things, you can still use the traditional list view for the tags:

I still have to do some final adjustments, but I hope Nifty Box 1.1 will be ready by the end of next week.