New Version of Nifty Box

Nifty Box is slowly approaching 1.0...

As the expiry date of the 0.9 version is near, I released a new version 0.99, that will work until 1st of October. The only new thing is the change of the UI theme: leaving the pre-Leopard Finder look for a more iTunes-like skin. I've written about that here.

I am currently working hard on some features for the 1.0 version of Nifty Box, but they are not ready for release yet. The handling of the tags in the detail view will become much better and it should be easier to tag items using the dock icon.

At the moment I am planning to release version 1.0 some time in September, but that could change.

Have fun with the new version of NB!

New Design

Apple's World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco is over. I have not attented and so I could only get the information, that has been made available to the general public. Judging from the keynote I think Leopard could be great: "time machine" can solve some issues I am facing all the time. It is not a simple "backup" utility, but a backup utility and version control system combined. All that with nice animation magic!

Unfortunately not much has been said about the future of Spotlight nor of the Finder. I was very curious to see the UI design of the new Finder, because I want Nifty Box to have basically the same look & feel as the Finder. The sad thing is, that the current Finder is not loved by many Mac users, especially the metal skin. As much as I used the current Finder as a blueprint for the UI design of Nifty Box I always wanted to get rid of the metal look as soon as possible.

For the first commercial release of Nifty Box I will now implement a design which is based on iTunes. This is one thing I have been working on the last couple of days and it is not yet finished, but I like to post a screenshot of how it looks like right now:



Dropping the metal skin and the wide borders makes the look more "light". In addition I also used a smaller font, so I can show the same amount of information by using less space without making the window too crowded. I hope you like the new design.

(The iTunes window was done by using the nice PolishedWindow code from Matt Gemmel. Thanks!)

My wish for Leopard: a better Spotlight

Now that Apple's World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) is about to begin it might be a good time to write down, what I would like for Leopard:

A better Spotlight!

One reason I have written Nifty Box is, that spotlight currently is only search. There is no easy way for a user to add own keywords or tags to a file. All metadata, that spotlight uses, is given by the specific application, which is responsible for the specific file (done by application specific spotlight importers).

On the other hand Tiger not only introduced spotlight but also extended file attributes (xattr). That is great: you can store any metadata you like, for example tags and keywords. But the sad thing is that spotlight in Tiger does not use these metadata!

If spotlight would read xattr metadata, tags and keywords could be used for all kinds of things, like for example "smart folders". And of course I could improve Nifty Box to export all the tags to xattr for direct use in spotlight.

Ah, would that be nice!

Ágætis byrjun

Now after a couple of months of (sometimes) hard work I am going live with Nifty Box Public Beta 0.9.

During this time I often changed the design of the app completely (maybe I will write more about this in another post). Nifty Box surely has some potential for future improvements, but I hope right now it is "An All Right Start".