The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

It's official: I want to be Rob Griffiths when I grow up. When I want to find some neat ricks or brush up on my AppleScripting for a project, I usually swing by Doug Adams' AppleScripts for iTunes which, in addition to what the title implies, is a good all around scripting resource. Rob, the man behind Mac OS X Hints, on the other hand, just calls up Doug and asks him to write a custom script. Sounds like a plan to me. Rob's recent request was for a script to help automate Spotlight comments, and make them more useful for searches, and he got what he asked for.

Spotlight Comments is a script that uses a combination of Spotlight comments and folder actions to allow users to use custom tags with saved searches, and also to automatically tag files placed in certain folders--e.g. downloads--so that they can be found quickly later. For instance, let's say you're keeping a project for work in a folder, but you're moving bits and pieces back and forth on disk and via email.  Maybe (hopefully!) you've made a couple of backups. Eventually, you want to track everything down. With Spotlight Comments, you can use tag the files, and then search for just the tag, rather than trying to come up with search criteria to match only the files from the project. Better yet, you can attach an action to the main project folder that automatically tags any file placed in it, so that you can find the files later, no matter where they've gotten off to.