Bug-Fix 1.2.1

There has been a nasty bug in version 1.2 that would sometimes cause Nifty Box on Leopard to use 100% CPU time after closing a window, but leaving Nifty Box running. This has been due to a bug in a NSObject category I implemented for dealing with delayed messages (I've written about this here and gave a brief explanation for those interested in Objective-C).
For all those not interested in the details: The bug has been fixed and using the new version is recommended.

Nifty Box 1.2

Nifty Box version 1.2 is ready for download!

This release adds AppleScript support to Nifty Box. Now you can access your Nifty Box tagging database through AppleScript or tag new items automatically. You can find some examples here.

AppleScript for Nifty Box

There is a new beta version of Nifty Box available for testing.

This version introduces AppleScript support for Nifty Box. Now you can tag files and web bookmarks automatically via AppleScript and much more. Just take a quick look at brief tour of the Nifty Box AppleScript interface!

If you are interested in testing the new beta version: download the beta from here.

Please bear in mind that this version is beta quality!
So please make a backup copy of your Nifty Box database located in ~/Library/Application Support/Nifty Box/NiftyBoxDB.sqlite before running the beta version.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to use the contact page.

Switching Hoster

In the next days I will be switching the hoster for nifty-box.com.

Update Nov. 8: Now the migration is finished. Everthing seems to be running alright.

New Nifty Box version for Leopard

Today is the day of the Leopard.

I made some small fixes so that Nifty Box plays well with the new Mac OS X release. There are no new features in this release (sorry for that), only one small added choice in the "View Options" for triggering what to display in the item table tool tips.

Lost Mail

I am very sorry, but it looks like I lost messages sent through the web contact formular. If you've sent some inquiry using the web formular and did not receive a response it's because of that. I am very, very sorry for that. Now everything should be fixed again.

In the meantime I did move to a new flat in Düsseldorf, Germany. Now I will have to set up everything and start working again on Nifty Box, especially making NB ready for Leopard. More about that later...

Killing bugs...

Yesterday I released a new bug fix for Nifty Box 1.1.2. Details can be found here. A big thanks to all who reported bugs and helped with the beta testing for this release!

Currently I am not making as much progress with NB 1.2 as I wish. This is mainly due to a new consulting job I've been working on since April, which takes up most of my time. Additionally I am looking for a new flat, so things are a bit chaotic right now. I hope that I will be able to work more constantly on NB 1.2 soon.

The feature set for 1.2 has not been decided yet, but I think the two most important features will be Spotlight import and AppleScript support. Spotlight import will help you to more-or-less automatically import new files into NB if they were tagged via the Spotlight comment field. This way you can import files, tagged by other tagging application as long as they also use the Spotlight comment field.

Making NB AppleScript-able is something I've always wanted to do, but I somehow did not find the time for it. Now I am going to do my homework and make NB a good mac citizen. This way you can use NB for an even better organization of your documents.

The 1.2 release is planned for autumn this year. I know, I've been quite lazy updating this blog for some time. In the future I will write more frequently and let you know how the development of NB 1.2 is getting on.

Nifty Box update

Today I released I small update for Nifty Box, now version 1.1.1.

Nothing much has changed: You now can choose the "&" symbol as a prefix in the Spotlight comments, which should be more convient when using the Spotlight quick search (at least in Tiger).

As a second addition you are now free to choose the side for the tag index drawer: left or right (adjustable in "View options").

Nifty Box 1.1 is here

Finally Nifty Box 1.1 is ready for download.

There are some couple of new things, most of all tag clouds and Spotlight export.

As you might notice I've also changed the design of the homepage. I hope you like it.

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.

Sorry for the delay...

I know, I am really behind schedule for the 1.1 release of Nifty Box. The two main new features took much more time than I thought, but I think most of 1.1 will be ready in the next days for the beta testers. After that I only have to update my web-site (the current design really sucks) and adjust the help file.

I am looking forward to releasing 1.1 later in February, because I think this release will be a huge step forward. In the next days I will write a bit more about the new tag organization feature of Nifty Box 1.1.

MacSanta

Maybe you've already heard about the latest Mac software promotion MacSanta organised by Rogue Amoeba. This is a great idea and I am happy to join the crowd with Nifty Box.

Purchase Nifty Box with a 20% discount through December 25: just enter the promotion code "MACSANTA" in the purchase process.

New feature for 1.1: Spotlight export

The last couple of weeks I've working on the export of tags and comments to Spotlight. This has been much more complicated than I expected. Nifty Box now writes the tags or comments to the Spotlight Comment field in the Finder's "Get Info..." window (for file items). This is a bit tricky.

First of all only the Finder can edit this field, which means one has to use AppleScript or AppleEvents. This is ok, there exists some source code from Apple (MoreFinderEvents) to do this. But during the testing sometimes strange things happened: for long comments written to this field it seems, that the Finder looses information about all the comments and icon positions in the folder of the changed item. After some experimenting I found, that the Spotlight Finder comment is written to the hidden .DS_Store file in the folder of the specific file. The .DS_Store contains all specific Finder information (like icon position and Spotlight comments) of all the files in the folder. But this information is somehow coded in blocks, which means that there is a maximum length set implicitly for the Spotlight comments. If you try to save a longer comment, the .DS_Store gets corrupted. By trial-and-error I concluded, that the combined length of the comment plus the length of the filename must not be greater than 1012 UTF-16 characters. Nifty Box will deal with this. For web bookmarks I dont use the Spotlight comment field, but provide an own Spotlight importer, which is much more convenient.

The way the Spotlight finder comments are used by Nifty Box is as follows: first all tags are written into the field, whereby these can be prefixed by a special character like "|" or "&". If you choose to use such a prefix, the Spotlight search can be narrowed down only to the Nifty Box items. An example: if you like to search in Spotlight for items tagged with "Apple" you would get a zillion hits if you just type in "Apple" in the search field, because - as you might guess - the word "Apple" can be found quite a lot on the mac. But if you only want to view the Nifty Box items, tagged with "Apple", you can define just a tag prefix like "|" and search in Spotlight for "|Apple" which should only give you the Nifty Box items.

After the tags you can choose to export your notes too. At the end a marker "_nybx_" is inserted into the comment field. After this marker the original comment from the Spotlight comment field is preserved. If the complete string (Nifty Box additions plus original comment) gets too long for the .DS_Store file, the Nifty Box additions will be shortened leaving the original comment complete.

Just to give you an impression, here is the new preferences tab for the Spotlight Export settings:



This will export a Spotlight Finder comment like this:



And here is an example Spotlight search for the tag "Mars": (please note the prefix "|")

In the screenshot you can also see the tagged web bookmarks at the top, which are provided by an Spotlight importer and not via the Finder's Spotlight comment field.

Using the Finder's Spotlight comment field for the file items also gives you information directly in the Finder if a file is tagged by Nifty Box: you can activate the "Comments" table column in the Finder window, which will show you the tag information for all files in a given folder:



So this export functionality is now implemented and in beta test. I am now working on the second new feature for version 1.1. I hope I will finish the development in December such that the new version can be released at the beginning of the new year.

Just a small bug fix release

This (1.0.1) is just a small bug fix release. Nothing new has been introduced. The bugs have not been severe: a couple of annoyances in the main menu, some problems with icon display in the item table, and strange behaviour with the toolbar.
Now I can focus on new features for 1.1. One thing I will definitely do is an export of the Nifty Box tags to the Spotlight comment field. This should make smart Finder folders even smarter. What other things will go into 1.1 I have not decided yet. I'll keep you informed on this blog.

Nifty Box 1.0

Ok, this is 1.0.
It was hard to stay away from implementing new features and just to work on the payment and licensing stuff. I have some nice ideas for improvement of Nifty Box but these will all go into version 1.1 (at least some of them), which should be ready in December, I think.

That's all for now.
Have fun with NB 1.0!

Preparing 1.0

I've finished most of the stuff for the first commercial release of Nifty Box right now. If all goes to plan it will be released by the end of next week. Although I said that I wont change the design I made some slight changes (rounded rects!) that should make the look of NB nicer - at least I think so.

For the registration stuff I included Lucas Newman's nice AquaticPrime framework and the auto update Sparkle from Andy Matuschak. Thanks!

All this was quite simple and fun. But right now I am reluctant to start the worst part of the job: updating the help file! I've always been a bad writer. Especially if you do not write in your native language it is quite a slow process.

The last beta

Today I released version 0.999 of Nifty Box. I hope this will be the last beta version and that I can ship the first commercial 1.0 version in October.

This whole process has taken much longer than I thought. More than half of September I've been working on improving the old import window with nice animations and stuff. But in the end I threw it all away, because an import window makes things only more complicated than necessary. I put the whole import functionality into the main window, which makes much more sense now.

If you are experimenting with the design of an application it's a lot of trial and error. In the end you look at your product and say: "Man, I could have coded that in a couple of weeks - not months!", because all these wrong ways and bad ideas in the design process cost much more time than the pure coding. But that's common knowledge for everyone being creative in one way or the other.

That said, I will stick to the current design until version 1.0. So for the first commercial release I will only do slight changes (if at all) and bug fixes. Version 0.999 is now pretty much, what v 1.0 will be. In the next weeks I will be quite busy setting up the payment process and license mechanism.

So, that's it. Please try out the last beta version and have fun!

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!)

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".