I think this might sound convenient to some of you who have suddenly shown up on Facebook on that photo some kid made at a party where you tried to set the world record for beer bong drinking. Ouch. As you know there are too many examples of people getting busted calling in sick for work. But Flickr has implemented this well and it could be a really nice tool. Both for organizing your own photos and the people who are in them and finding other people’s photos you are in.

So how does this work? The new feature is called People in Photos and it lets you add any Flickr member to a photo. But it’s also possible to highlight people who are not registered on Flickr, although they have to give their permission by email. You tag someone on the photo by typing in their name, just like you would with a Flickr tag for the photo. For Flickr users who are familiar with notes, it should be easy to draw a face boundary on the photo.

People in photos is hooked up to Your Activity, so you’ll always know who has tagged you in other photos or when other people have added faces to your photos. The Flickr team has done a lot of work on all the privacy preferences. You can allow certain people to add you to photos or add other people to your photos. You can even decide per photo if you want to be on it, so that’s good news for that one embarrassing surprise photo when you were just waking up.

Of course many people use Flickr as their photo storage or at least have a Yahoo account which you can use for Flickr. But even when they’re not a member but appear on your photos they can be invited by e-mail. They then have the same level of control as Flickr members have over on what photos they want to show up.

To learn more about People in Photos have a look at FAQs provided by Flickr:

• What is People in Photos?
• How do I add a person to a photo?
• Who can add me to a photo?
• How can I remove myself from a photo?
• How will I know when I’m added to a photo?

The complete People in Photos FAQs are available here.

Up until now Flickr is mostly used for more professional arty photos, while Facebook or a Twitter service like Twitpic is used for quick snapshots, perhaps made with a camera phone. Do you think this new feature will change this? Have you been waiting for this or do you use it on Facebook?

For more information on a way to use Flickr more for sharing on Twitter read this article on Twitpic and Flickr2Twitter. More Flickr tips and tricks can be found here.

Image credit: allyaubry

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Tagging is commonplace around blogs and websites, MakeUseOf too has its own tagcloud. We all agree that it’s a speedy way to scour out a web resource; nearly single click in its utility. We are so used to it that we perhaps miss it as a feature in Windows.

Windows XP was born much before Web 2.0 came about. So, there’s the easy explanation. Vista of course has file tagging and Vista Quick Search as a feature but with a leaning towards only Office docs and a few limitations for certain file types like TXT, RTF, and PNG etc. Even then with all ifs and buts, Vista’s search is better for it. Windows XP meanwhile lags behind, huffing and puffing in its file search.

To plug the want, there is always one or the other software. You might have tried out the previously mentioned TaggedFrog. Another of its type is Tag2Find.

There was a brief mention of it some time back. So, let’s take a closer look at how Tag2Find saves us XP users (why not Vista’s too?) some grunt work.

Tag2Find (ver. 0.10.2.5) is a 2.23 MB freeware that allows us to tag Windows files and make our search less tedious. According to the site, it’s still in the technical preview stage and the developers are looking to make further improvements.

The First Steps to Tag Windows Files

There are three pre-requisites for installing Tag2Find on your machine –

• Windows XP (Home, Professional) or Vista (32-bit)
• NET Runtime 2.0
• NTFS-formatted file system

For installation, you need administer privileges on your system. The installation runs through a few configuration screens for setting up the location of the internal tag database which stores all the tag info.

Another sequence of steps is for selecting the files/folders and the extensions you want to tag during the initial setup (The Intial Tagging Wizard). That done the installer shows a brief video clip revealing how tag2find should be used. Don’t worry, it’s a cinch.

Tag2find covers all locations that make it easy to tag Windows files – desktop, explorer toolbar, system tray and the right click context menu.

Quickie tagging…

During installation, the Initial Tagging Wizard helps out by letting you select the files, folders and extensions which you want to include in your tags. The wizard can be opened later on too.

You can tag your Windows files by a selection or a drag and drop using three different approaches –

• By a drag and drop on the Tag2Find explorer toolbar icon.
• By right-clicking on the selected file and using the context menu.
• By using the Floating Tag Box manually.

Going for any of these three processes opens up a Tag2Find window. The window displays the entire tag list, some suggested tags and info on the file that is to be tagged. Clicking on Details gives you additional file information and a preview if available.

Tag2Find also makes it simple for new files by actively monitoring selected file locations (watched folders). The New File Monitor pops up like an alert box and gives you a quick way to tag the file.

Find them out using tags

Tags wouldn’t be of much help if we don’t have an equally easy way of using tags to shortlist the files we want. Fill in the tag search term in the Tag2Find field box to display the files labeled by the tag in the Results Preview. Open the files from within the preview window or drag and drop it elsewhere. You can also view related tags by entering a comma after the first one. A plus is the graphical bar which is color coded to indicate the relative usage of the file in terms of the tag.

Get the big picture using the TagBrowser

The TagBrowser is like the centerpiece for all your tags. Browse, sort or filter your tags from the explorer like browser window. TagBrowser is also the tool for mass management of all  tags. Edit tags or set new ones for a bunch of files for rapid organization. One click filters easily set apart documents from other file types like movies and music.

What’s a tag without a tag cloud? The TagBrowser has the option of displaying all your tags either as a tag cloud (with the relative sizes for importance) or as a list.

This is not all there is to it the free software. Some little extras can be found within the settings for TagBrowser. Decide on the color of the tags, set the transparency of the Floating Tag Box, import export tags, auto-play and preview media files in TagBrowser or the tag detail pop-up make it quite a rounded application.

First impressions…

On first install and use, some users might just stop short, just because we are so used to web tags. The initial pause done away with, Tag2Find provides lots of flexible ways to tag all your files. Searching by tag is also snappy. It’s almost like an Explorer replacement… addition of an Explorer-like directory structure might just make it one. The PDF help file provided on the site makes the learning curve less acute. The beginning looks and feels good.

If you are an old XP hand (or even a Vista user), give file tagging with Tag2Find a shot. Who knows it might be the ticket for a better organized computer. Are you familiar with any other tool to tag Windows files? Let us know in comments!

Image Credit: rooneyjohn

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• TaggedFrog – Cool File Tagging App for Windows (9)
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Thanks to the luxury of virtually unlimited storage space that we have today, computer users have developed the “save everything now, think about them later” attitude. The problem is, for some “too many things to do” people – like me (and maybe most of you) – “later” might never come.

Then one day, the hundredth time you find yourself rummaging your hard drive(s) for that one specific file that you really need without a clue about the file identity, you’ll wish you’d done something earlier in the file-organizing department.

The Grouping & The Searching

The most common solution to file organization problems is to group the similar files into folders. For examples: all the files related to Project X would go into folder “Project X”, while all the MP3 files will go into the “Music” folder.

Problems arise when you have to decide where to put files from Project X that are also a MP3. And most of the time, it is far more complicated than that.

To help you increase the effectiveness of using folders as a means of organizing files, you can try Smart Folder.

• Go to Finder then to File → New Smart Folder menu (or Command + Option + N)

You can also create a smart folder by doing a search in the Finder window.

• Set the rules of the folder by choosing the options available there.
• Click the plus button (+) to add more rules.
• Click the minus button (-) to delete a rule.

A few things that you can set for example: the location of the file, the kind of file, last opened date, last modified date, name, etc.

Don’t forget to hit the “Save” button after all the rules have been customized and tick the “Add To Sidebar” box to put the smart folder to the sidebar so that you can access them easily.

This way, you can set the contents of the smart folder to be PDF files which were created within a week and have the word “billing” in the name. Once a PDF file is more than one week old, it will automatically be out of the smart folder.

If you no longer need the smart folder, just right click and choose “Remove from Sidebar” from the pop-up menu.

The Tagging

Mac users can improve the usability of Smart Folder and Spotlight searching by adding tags to the files. You can assign multiple tags to a file or folder and go beyond the grouping files inside folders.

The traditional way of doing tagging is by adding Spotlight comments from the file info window. You can access the file info windows by right clicking on the item and choose “Get Info” from the pop-up menu, or select the item and press Command + I.

But doing the tagging one file or folder at a time is a tedious and time-consuming activity. Not to mention boring. The simpler way is by using TagIt.

It is a small application that will help you to tag multiple files easily. TagIt also makes the process of searching files based on their tags easier. And as a bonus, you can also assign ratings to the file(s) or folder(s).

You can search tags directly from Spotlight by using the search string “tag:the_name_of_the_tag” sans quote.

Few possible scenarios of using tags to files and folders are:

• Assign “Ongoing” tag to something that you are currently working on and change the tag to “Done” after finishing the project.
• Assign the client’s names as tags to the file.
• Use the ratings as the “Importance” level.
• Add the team member’s names.
• Add the revision number.

And by adding tags to the Smart Folder’s rules, you can organize your files and folders so much better.

What about you? What method do you use to organise files? Share using the comment section below.

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• The 4 Proven Simple Tips to Organize Your Files on Windows (19)
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We have previously covered Google Labs features for Gmail. Here are 7 more innovative Gmail labs features that should not escape your awareness.

To enable Gmail Labs features, log into your Gmail account, go to >Settings >Labs, browse all experimental features and check enable for the ones you would like to use, then finally save your changes. As will be described below, some features require further settings to come into effect.

Signature Tweaks

No one wants to scroll through pages of quoted text to find contact information in the signature, right?

Signature Tweaks is one of the most simple features, taking care of this signature dilemma.

It tweaks your signature so that it will appear above the quoted text, rather than below it, which would be the default behavior. Simple, but cool.

Location in Signature

If you travel a lot, Location in Signature could be a fun feature or simply an easy way to share with your friends where you currently are.

To make your location appear in your signature, you need to enable this feature, have a signature (>Settings >General) and check “Append your location to the signature” below the signature box.

If you’re sneaky you could of course cheat a little and change your location manually. I wonder whether anyone has sent eMails from Mars, yet. April Fools Day anyone?

Superstars

Superstars gives you several more “stars” to star or visually tag your mail.

You can edit your superstars by going to >Settings >General and dragging icons from “not in use” to “in use” and vice versa.

Personally, I would love to see an even bigger variety of icons, for example gif images to draw extra attention and smileys.

Previews In Mail For Yelp, Picasa, Flickr & YouTube

Here we have one of the newer set of features added in mid March. It’s actually four individual features, but the essence is the same. If someone shares a Yelp review, a Picasa, Flickr or YouTube link, you no longer have to open the URL in a new browser tab. You can view the preview right in your mail.

Multiple Inboxes

Gmail supports filters, but filters can too easily drag mail from your attention, by silently moving them into the target folders. With Multiple Inboxes you can move important mail back into your field of vision. It gives you five extra panels that will appear in a custom location next, above or below your inbox.

Once the Multiple Inboxes feature is enabled, you can go to >Settings >Multiple Inboxes and add search queries for messages you always want have handy.

Here is how that will look like. On the left is my inbox, on the right you see the extra panels, which are starred messages, drafts and eMails from Twine.

Mail Goggles

This one will keep you from sending stupid mails in the middle of the night by making you solve math problems before being able to send an eMail.

Per default it is active Friday and Saturday between 10pm and 4am, but you can manually adjust days, times and difficulty level under >Settings >Generals.

Undo Send

Despite any precautions, accidents happen. So if you still send the wrong mail to the wrong person, you may be delighted to learn that Google has just recently implemented a feature that allows you to call your mail back.

Unfortunately, the undo feature will only work for a few seconds right after the message was sent. So you have to quickly realize your mistake!

What novel features would you like to see in Gmail Labs?

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The concept here is similar, although the focus is different. 3tags is designed as a way to store and organize notes online securely. Bear in mind that it’s new, and has a fair way to go. Nonetheless, it’s both interesting and useful.

If you’re familiar with delicious (and who isn’t?) then it’s easy to think of 3tags as the opposite. We don’t want to share this information. Instead we want to ensure that it cannot be shared.

The basis of the platform is that your browser, and especially the javascript that runs inside it, are capable of high grade encryption and decryption. So you write notes locally, and then they, along with your credentials, are saved and encrypted on your PC, and then stored on the web. Even the developers at 3tags are unable to dig around inside your stored information.

Before we get into the details, just remember. It’s encryption, and it’s the web. Keep your wits about you, and don’t gamble your home, job, or children on this working properly. The risk and the decisions are both yours.

The initial screen in 3tags is somewhat sparse, but it soon fills up once you add some notes.

In order to do that, click in the obvious spot… the Add button.

Fill in the boxes to suit. This is a famous New Zealand biscuit (cookie) recipe. I’m reliably told by Google that the name has to do with the colour of the cookies, and not the folk from Afghanistan. Who knew? By the way, Google can do the metric to imperial conversions if you’d like to try the recipe.

Obviously this recipe is not exactly a secret, but you can see how the interface works. Note that you should separate the tags with semi-colons, despite the lack of instruction around that. The rich text editor works just as you might expect otherwise.

Click Save.

Your note is added to the (empty) list, along with some metadata, and the tags are all listed down the left hand side for easy location later on. Search is something that is missing currently and might be useful if you have stored a lot of notes in 3tags.

Once you have more notes in the system, the preview pane on the lower part of the screen is handy for quickly checking out the content of each note with a single click.

For more serious changes you can click the Edit button, and you can remove individual notes using Delete.

Notice that the note I added also has a link in it. That link becomes clickable and underlined for easy use.

That’s basically it. It’s worth noting that making use of the site requires your computer to process javascript at a reasonable speed, and that language wasn’t really designed for this. 3tags recommends the use of Firefox rather than Internet Explorer, purely due to the speed at which it can process the javascript encryption and decryption routines.

As I said, it’s all pretty new.  I found a few unexpected wrinkles. For instance, it didn’t seem to like me coming back and adding more tags to a note after I had created it. Your mileage may vary.

You may also want to check out T.J’s article about TaggedFrog which is also about online tagging.

Let me know how you get on with both 3tags and the Afghans. Do you use any other websites that store your data with encryption? Are you familiar with an easier/safer way to organize notes online.

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Most often they are used on blogs but they are also used in various ways on social networking sites such as Delicious, news sites like Newsvine or even online stores like Amazon. Any site that generates regular or changing content will usually have some sort of tag system in place. So why just the web? Why can’t we have it on our PCs as well?

TaggedFrog is a simple and free file tagging app for Windows XP or Vista that allows for the easy addition of files to be tagged with as many descriptive keywords (tags) as you can possibly think of. You can then visualize them in a cloud display which looks very similar to your everyday cloud display you see on many websites today.

You first begin tagging the files by adding and managing the keywords you’d like to create for your files.

An easy drag and drop interface allows for the easy addition of any type of file, document or web link from your computer. Once they are added, you can simply add any of your created tags to that file.

So now, instead of renaming and changing files as they are created, you can quickly and easily add tags to them. This allows for easy filtering and searching of your hundreds of thousands of files.

Along with the tag cloud, you can also set up “favorites” for locating some of the more popular files and tags. If you’d prefer not to go through and tag all of your files manually, you can also set up options to go through your entire hard drive with the nice “Auto Scan and Tag” feature.

The simple and clean interface, and fast search capability of tags, makes TaggedFrog a great alternative to the Windows Vista launch bar, and MUCH better search alternative than on Windows XP. Adding tags in Vista can be very tedious and having a separate application to keep them organized can become very handy when files begin to pile up on your PC.

There are plenty of other search alternatives (Windows Desktop Search, Google Desktop, etc…) than a tagging application like this. But if you simply want better organization of files, instead of creating hundreds of directories, and you don’t want to bog down your computer with search indexing, then TaggedFrog is likely the right application for you.

What do you think of tagging files instead of simply searching? Are there any other file tagging applications for Windows that you use?

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• Tag2Find – Tag Files in Windows for Better Organization (4)
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However this time, its a list with a difference. The add-ons in this list are the Winners of the Extend Firefox contest organised by Mozilla Labs.

The add-ons are classified into three categories.

Best New Firefox Add-on

Pencil

Pencil is a GUI prototyping and diagramming add-on. This means that you can use Pencil to create mockups of windows, buttons, panes etc. Some of the features of Pencil are:

• Built-in stencils for diagramming and prototyping
• Multi-page document with background page
• On-screen text editing with rich-text supports
• PNG rasterizing
• Undo/redo supports
• Installing user-defined stencils
• Standard drawing operations: aligning, z-ordering, scaling, rotating…
• Cross-platforms
• Adding external objects

This may not seem useful for an average user but it means and speaks a lot about the capabilities and the extensible nature of Firefox (apart from the countless uses for developers and UI designers)

Tagmarks

Firefox 3 offers a neat feature for bookmarking webpages that you visit by clicking on the star in the address bar. If you thought that was clever and useful wait till you have a look at Tagmarks. Tagmarks adds a set of icons to the quick bookmarks, allowing you to quickly add tags to your bookmarks by clicking on each icon. A lot like Gmail Superstars which let you classify your mail and then search them based on the star you applied to the conversation.

HandyTag

Can’t think of relevant tags for the page you are bookmarking? Fear not HandyTag comes to the rescue!. Handy tags simply provides a set of the most relevant keywords in the bookmark’s edition panel. These keywords are retrieved from many different sources so that you don’t have to think much!

The following add-ons are the runners up in the ‘New Addons’ category. However I like some of them better than the winners! Read on ahead and see if you agree or disagree.

Webchunks

This is one of my favourites and one of the most anticipated add-ons. First off you need to know what a webslice is. A webslice is a new way that allows you to subscribe to only a part of the webpage. Using webslices you could subscribe to the area containing the most recent article here on Make Use Of. This is an Internet Explorer 8 feature, but Firefox can’t be left behind, can it?

In fact Firefox does it even better than Internet Explorer because using IE requires the author of the webpage to specify an area of the page as “Webslice”. However using Firefox with Greasemonkey, you can get webslices on any page on the Web and then subscribe to that slice using webchunks.

Check out this link to know what I am talking about.

Badges on Favicon

Badges on Favicon allows you to put a rounded badge over the tab favicon of some pages.

These badges will show numeric snippets of information from the page, for example your unread mails from Gmail or the stock quotes from Yahoo Finance.

This way you can always see that data, even if you’re navigating on another tab.

The extension uses little scripts, called badgets. Each badget is designed for a particular webpage and you can get more here. There are not a huge number of badgets available at this time, however it is an interesting concept, especially when you combine it with the Faviconize Tab add-on.

Devo

This one is again one of my favorites. Devo is like Enso Launcher for your browser. Hit SHIFT+X to open up the UI. Just type the action keyword followed by the parameters (if there are any).

(i.e) to search Make Use Of on Google you would: Hit Shift + X, type google and then type in Make Use of and hit enter. There are many more complex commands like “play.song”. You can even write your own commands for Devo.

Close ‘n’ Forget

Close n Forget is simple and useful. It lets you close the current tab and practically forget about the visit. This means that it removes the related cookies and the whole domain’s pages from the history (if it is configured to do so). I can see some mischevious uses for this one!

Callout

Callout allows the web applications and Greasemonkey scripts access to the notification area of your operating system provided that they use the Callout API. Not many web applications and scripts use the callout API yet, but this certainly has a potential to become huge.

Reasy

Reasy is a RSVP (Rapid Sequential Visual Presentation) Reader. In English this means that it presents a word or two at the same place at a rapid rate to help you read better. Select some text ( > 25 words) and a pop up appears, click on the text and the Rapid Sequential Visual Presentation starts. Great for reading large chunks of text on a web page. Check out spreeder which is a similar web app.

Best Updated Firefox Add-ons

Read it Later

Read it later has already been covered on Make Use Of before here and here . Some of the newer features include offline reading, sync between computers, and RSS feed creation.

TagSifter

If you have lots of bookmarks in your browser, consider using tags to sort and classify them. Then if you use tags, Tagsifter is a must. Tagsifter provides you an efficient way to browse your bookmarks by tags. Tagging helps in managing your bookmarks and tagsifter helps you to find that link which you bookmarked two months back but only vaguely remember what it was about.

Bookmarks Previews

If you liked the Pogo browser but couldn’t use it, then Bookmarks Previews allows you to get some of those features. This extension allows you to view you bookmarks in style! You can choose from among the coveted album flow animation, thumbnail view of the bookmarks and a tool tip preview of you bookmarks. Excellent to jazz up your browser a little while still remaining useful.

Best Music Addon

And the award goes to…

Fire.fm

Fire.fm allows you access to last.fm’s music library. You can listen to music related to your favorite artist, and discover new artists and music in the process. You can find Last.fm users with musical tastes similar to your own. Quickly access your favorite stations by just typing a few letters into the location bar. If you are into music, you must check it out.

Please note that some of these add-ons are still experimental and may require you to login with your Mozilla account (which is free to create), or alternatively you can download the extensions from the developers’ pages.

Which ones are your favorite add-ons that can perform similar tasks? Tell us about your dream add-ons and functionalities that you wish existed.

(By) – Varun Kashyap who loves Firefox add-ons. He blogs about latest on the web, firefox, tech tips, tweaks and hacks on TechCrazy Blog

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Zigtag is currently in private BETA, yet the wonderful folks at Zigtag have given MakeUseOf readers exclusive BETA invites. The only other thing you need is their Firefox/Internet Explorer Add-On which allows you to add tags, share pages, etc. (You are also able to simply drag and drop a bookmarklet if you are unable to install the add-on.)

After that you should be ready to start tagging! To do so, simply click on the Zigtag logo in your web browser to allow it to load in your sidebar. You should then receive a certain number of suggested tags that Zigtag believes are directly related to the page you are currently viewing. You may then click on one of the tags to add it to the page and/or add your own by typing it in the box. All of which are used to describe the page you are currently viewing, and make them available to the rest of the world – somewhat like Digg or del.icio.us in that sense.

Let me give you an example:

I picked the “Powersurf Through Friendfeed with StumbleRead” article by Mark. I added some keywords and “favorited” it. I then decided to share it with the group I created by clicking “Share,” and “Group.” The article then showed up on the group page, which I created. Even more options arise including the availability to: comment on pages, tag them further, view other pages with the same tag(s) – which I may add includes even more options.

Of course, as you can see, groups are a major part of Zigtag. You are allowed to create your own group or join another (there are tons of them). Groups range from computers to being existent, so I am sure that you could find many different groups. Furthermore, in groups you may discuss different things on the group page and see updates on your Zigtag homepage regarding your groups.

One really neat feature of Zigtag is the option to import del.icio.us bookmarks. You may do so by clicking “My Account,” then clicking “Import/Export Bookmarks.” You are as well allowed to import existing bookmarks from different web browsers, including: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Opera (sorry Flock users). Once your bookmarks are imported you should receive an email indicating that they were successfully imported.

Zigtag is definitely a great resource for finding sites related to anything and possibly could be the next level of Digg? I highly recommend trying it out as you will most certainly enjoy using it.

If you like, you may even add me as a friend here, or join my group here.

What do you like – or not like – about Zigtag? Grab your beta account, test it out then come back and tell us what you think in the comments!

Will Mueller is a computer nerd and geek that has been working with computers for far too long. He currently works on one of his blogs at FirefoxGeeks.

Will Mueller is a computer nerd and geek that has been working with computers for far too long. He currently works on one of his blogs at FirefoxGeeks.

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Fear not, Mp3tag is here. It can rename files based on tag information, replace certain characters and/or words currently present in your tags and filenames. Mp3tag also can import and export tag information. It even supports the freedb database to lookup selected files so you can automagically get the correct tags for your music.

Features

Mp3tag can perform many features for free. While supplying full Unicode support, it can write ID3v1, ID3v2, APEv2-Tags and Vorbis comments to multiple files at the same time. This allows you to retag whole collections or albums with little effort. It can download the CD cover art for the files you’re editing while helping you create new playlists for them.

While renaming or tagging, Mp3tag has recursive sub-folder support which means it can dig through your folders and sub-folders for this tagging renaming sensation. A nice feature it has is the ability to export tag information into user-defined formats (html, xml, etc).

Compatibility

Mp3tag supports multiple file formats. This is essential for those of us who have their collection in various audio formats. The following is a list of the supported formats:

• aac
• flac
• ape
• mp3
• mp4 / m4a / m4b
• mpc
• ogg
• ofr
• ofs
• spx
• tak
• tta
• wma
• wv

Is that enough? Sure seems to be a quite comprehensive list of formats, eh?

Operating System: Works on Windows XP and up.

Convinced yet? If you want to see more about Mp3tag, check out their huge list of screenshots or just download it and start fixing up your MP3 collection right away.

You might also want to check out Mark’s MakeUse Of review of Audioshell which is also a MP3 tag editor.

(By) Travis is a husband, engineer, entrepreneur, technology swami, visual communicator, WordPress lover and writer in his spare time. You can check out his personal blog at TQuizzle.com.

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1. Organize your Mac

Having a cluttered workspace takes up precious time when you’re trying to find certain documents which you might have misplaced. The first step in using your time wisely to do work is organization – knowing where everything goes. There are several ways to accomplish this.

I’ve seen some desktops with over a hundred files on it. Some people like to show how busy they are by leaving all their documents right where others can see them. A messy desktop can only be more time consuming when you’re trying to figure out which was the last file you were working on, a hassle to look for a certain file and will only increase the tendency to accidentally move things about (especially into Trash). Also, clearing your desktop will indirectly clear your mind psychologically, so you’ll probably think better. For instance, check out the screenshot below.

2. Organizing files into folders and labeling

Most of my important document files are in my Documents folder and within that folder, there are about twenty sub folders. Each one has got a very clear title to describe their content. And since I have so many folders, I add color labels to the ones which I frequently open, so that my eyes zone into them before I know it.

But the thing is, you may have folders within those sub folders. And sometimes it may even be several folders deep before you reach the file you want, making it more of a hassle to get to. Another problem is, not all files can be distributed to only one folder. For instance, if I have a PDF file about Multiple Sclerosis (i am a med-student), it could go into my PDFs folder and also my Medicine folder. In order to tackle this problem, I use tags.

3. Tagging made easy with Punakae

The idea of tagging is to add one or several keywords to a file, making it easier to find files relating to those keywords. It may sound like a hassle to tag every file you have, but trust me it’s easier than it sounds, and more rewarding. Tags can essentially eliminate having multiple folders since files can be found much easier this way. This idea of tagging is not new, even iPhoto uses it and allows you to add keywords to each of your photos.

To find out more about Punakae and how it works, check out this video screencast. But be warned, the guy narrating might not be a native English speaker and it may sound a little funny.

4. Doing more with Safari

Tabbed browsing is extremely useful. Nobody denies this. But if you’re like me and have 15 tabs opened at the same time every morning when I browse through all my favorite sites, it gets a little tedious clicking the X on each tab to close them. Mastering the Safari shortcut keys are very helpful in making your browsing experience a pleasure.

• Command-T: Open new tab
• Command-N: Open new window
• Command-click link: Opens link in new tab
• Command-W: Close tab
• Command-Alt-W: Close all other tabs
• Command-Shift-W: Close window
• Command-R: Refresh current tab
• Command-Shift- { or }: Switch tabs
• Backspace: Back
• Spacebar: Page down
• Command-D: Add bookmark

By default, Google is Safari’s search engine. However I recommend installing Inquisitor. It is a search engine plug-in which extends the capability of searching by giving you suggestions and showing you some possible results even before you hit Return. Clicking on those results will take you directly to that site bypassing Google’s results page.

5. Use To-do lists

Reminding yourself constantly that you have a list of work to be done could be stressful so you might as well forget them! I’m not saying that you needn’t remember anything at all. I’m only emphasizing that thinking about the task at hand will make life easier. Jotting down your list of things to be done somewhere, organizing your thoughts and assigning due dates to each of them is the easiest way to accomplish this.

Getting-things-done applications (GTD) are widely popular so I won’t cover them again. A few good ones have already been elaborated on this site, which are Things for Mac, Remember The Milk, Simple GTD, Task Toy and a few others covered by Daniel.

6. Integrating Apple Mail, iCal and Address Book

There are several new features in Apple Mail 3.0 and a very prominent one is the addition of Data Detectors. Place your cursor over an email address and you have the option of adding that person as a contact into Address Book. It will also highlight dates, times, and certain keywords like ‘tomorrow’, ‘later today’, ‘15th of March’ which can be added into iCal as appointments. Addresses will also be detected and mapped into directions. Since Apple provided us with these features, we might as well make use of them.

7. Use Automator for repetitive tasks

I basically use Automator to save time on little tasks such as batch renaming, automatically sending birthday emails to friends, properly re-capitalizing song titles in iTunes, watermarking my PDF files and batch-resizing images. If you would like to know how I do all this, shout out in the comments and I will consider writing a tutorial solely on Automator.

8. Enlarge your screen estate

The easiest way to do this is to get a larger screen, of course. Or have 3 of them like Al Gore. Another way is to use Spaces. By default, Spaces extends your desktop up to 4 times (4 desktops). However, if you notice its preferences more carefully, you will see that you’re actually able to have up to 16 desktops! That’s a whole lot of estate to play with, and pretty troublesome to maneuver too.

Warp is a preference pane that will allow you to use your mouse to switch between Spaces, rather than using the keyboard shortcut. By moving your mouse cursor to an edge of the screen, you will see a small preview of the neighboring desktop, and clicking on it will ‘warp’ you there. It’s a pretty cool application to help you navigate if you can’t remember what’s running on each desktop.

If you would like to see how Warp works, check it the screencast at the bottom of this page.

That concludes my two-part article on increasing productivity on your Mac. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I have writing it.

(By) Jackson Chung is a full-time med student attempting to perform a juggling act with relationship, studies and his future.

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So if you listen to your albums on your MP3 player, you’ll end up with mis-named songs which makes it virtually impossible to find what you’re looking for. The key is to be able to edit the “ID3 tags” of the file which will change the name of the MP3 file to whatever you want it to be. If you use iTunes and an iPod, changing the ID3 tags is very easy. But there isn’t an easy way to change the tags inside Windows Explorer – until today when I found the freeware ID3 tag editor program Audioshell.

Audioshell is a shell program which integrates into Windows Explorer and allows you to edit your ID3 tags quickly and easily (you can edit tags by track or by groups). You can even upload cover art to each MP3 file.

First of all, download and install Audioshell. Then select the MP3 file to be edited and right-click with the mouse. Select “Properties”. You’ll now see two new tabs in the properties section. The one you need is the Audioshell Tag Editor :

Change the required fields to what you want it to be, upload your cover art (if you want to) then press OK. When you play the song, it will now show the song title properly :

The Tag Editor also has a comments section so you can theoretically tag each song to find it again quickly.

Does anyone know of any Audioshell alternatives? I really like Audioshell and its simplicity but if anyone else has any other suggestions, I would love to hear them.

Download Audioshell.

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