one great admin technique i used under the pre-mac os x days:
labels of a shade of gray did not appear on an icon (i don't know why, but it didn't). when you did a clean install of all your apps, you could make a gray label color and call it "clean install". open you hard drive... select all. hit command, option, shift, right arrow to explode ALL folders. set label to "clean install."
now, every time i updated something, i knew EXACTLY what had been replaced, as it would lose the custom label i applied. the gray color was just for aesthetic purposes (i would have gone mad if every icon on my drive was blue-tinted).
unfortunately, the same technique doesn't work as well under os x variants, as many files are invisible, so it's hardly effective to label everything as such (plus, now, having every name on your drive with a gray background would be equally maddening).
another important use for labels is to mark what stage a project may be at, or if a file has been backed up to a file server (can't tell you how many times i have copied a file four or five times to the same place because i would constantly get interrupted from file to file).
Seriously, people woud often categorize files in a single folder by labels, usually by priority (red = hot/important, blue = cool/on the back burner) in any arbitrary way they need at the time.
Mac users had labels for years with the old Mac OS, and lost them for a while in Mac OS X. A lot of people, especially in graphics, absoutely depended on labels in folders with 1500 fonts or pictures in them in order to tell them apart and sort through them quickly. I was hoping for something a little more flexible or powerful instead, but hopefully that's still in the works.
Ding ding ding ding ding!
I had completely forgotten about the advantages of labels after a couple years of Mac OS X. What happened when I got Panther? Within a couple weeks, I'd already started sparsely using labels for exactly this task. It started when I downloaded about 150 photos from my camera. I didn't want to bother with iPhoto and I didn't want to break the files into separate directories or rename all of them. Solution? As I went through picking out which ones needed postprocessing and which ones were really good, I stuck labels on accordingly. What a time saver!!
I just did the same for my fonts folder, putting labels on which ones the OS installed amd which ones I got from different sources. It makes it *great* for backing up *just* what you need out of a couple hundred files, as rok said in another post above.
Now, if only Apple could finish that magical HFS++ with pervasive ubermetadata in the Finder and throughout. Hopefully this is a stopgap fix.
It's a great feature, use it allot. All my work related documents are yellow for example, car related stuff is blue and personal documents are red. Then it's easy to search all documents of certain colour. It's one of Panther's greatest features IMO
Comments
labels of a shade of gray did not appear on an icon (i don't know why, but it didn't). when you did a clean install of all your apps, you could make a gray label color and call it "clean install". open you hard drive... select all. hit command, option, shift, right arrow to explode ALL folders. set label to "clean install."
now, every time i updated something, i knew EXACTLY what had been replaced, as it would lose the custom label i applied. the gray color was just for aesthetic purposes (i would have gone mad if every icon on my drive was blue-tinted).
unfortunately, the same technique doesn't work as well under os x variants, as many files are invisible, so it's hardly effective to label everything as such (plus, now, having every name on your drive with a gray background would be equally maddening).
another important use for labels is to mark what stage a project may be at, or if a file has been backed up to a file server (can't tell you how many times i have copied a file four or five times to the same place because i would constantly get interrupted from file to file).
Originally posted by BuonRotto
Seriously, people woud often categorize files in a single folder by labels, usually by priority (red = hot/important, blue = cool/on the back burner) in any arbitrary way they need at the time.
Mac users had labels for years with the old Mac OS, and lost them for a while in Mac OS X. A lot of people, especially in graphics, absoutely depended on labels in folders with 1500 fonts or pictures in them in order to tell them apart and sort through them quickly. I was hoping for something a little more flexible or powerful instead, but hopefully that's still in the works.
Ding ding ding ding ding!
I had completely forgotten about the advantages of labels after a couple years of Mac OS X. What happened when I got Panther? Within a couple weeks, I'd already started sparsely using labels for exactly this task. It started when I downloaded about 150 photos from my camera. I didn't want to bother with iPhoto and I didn't want to break the files into separate directories or rename all of them. Solution? As I went through picking out which ones needed postprocessing and which ones were really good, I stuck labels on accordingly. What a time saver!!
I just did the same for my fonts folder, putting labels on which ones the OS installed amd which ones I got from different sources. It makes it *great* for backing up *just* what you need out of a couple hundred files, as rok said in another post above.
Now, if only Apple could finish that magical HFS++ with pervasive ubermetadata in the Finder and throughout.
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/applescpttdg/
From the O'Reilly folks, if you couldn't figure that out from the URL.
Originally posted by Brad
that magical HFS++ with pervasive ubermetadata in the Finder and throughout.
¡Yo quiero linkage! (or: this is so exciting I'd like you to whip out some links, if you have them and are so inclined).