Wish: Return Finder Labels to Mavericks

[fred]

I like @Alkesh's suggestion of putting the dots on the left of the filenames instead of on the right.

I am finding that sorting by tags in column view to be quite useful, since each colour gets its own section and items with two tags get repeated in each section.

I always found the full-width colour bars to be a bit overwhelming and Fisher-Price like.

[darwin]

Good news, everyone. Finally, I started serious work on this feature.

I believe I have pretty robust implementation of Label Colors in List View under Mavericks:

You can download 1.5.28 and test it:
http://downloads.binaryage.com/TotalFinder-1.5.28.dmg

Your feedback is welcome. I still have to implement similar behaviour in Column Mode and Icon Mode.

[ramses_danta]

Yay .... thank you !!! We've been waiting for this feature for such a long time
I just tried the color labels in list mode and they look awesome -- with the risk of sounding ungrateful, can I ask if color labels will also come to "column view" please

[Thanehand]

I realize this is a "me-too" post, but I really wanted to post a reply giving a heart-felt thank you for adding the label functionality. And additionally, another for the amazing amount of work you have been doing on the product lately.

[darwin]

TotalFinder 1.5.29 has complete implementation of label colors in List View, Column View and Icon View:
http://downloads.binaryage.com/TotalFinder-1.5.29.dmg

I'm pretty happy with the implementation, it should be performant and pretty clean. I'm ready for bug fixing and resolving rough edges.

[willynanita]

Yes! let's fix the edges, they should be rounded... And, also, labels are present even if I don't select that option in preferences. Turning on and off labels does nothing, Label colors are shown no matter what.

[darwin]

You are right. The label colors in Icon View are effective regardless of the the preferences. This is a bug.

I will try to render them with rounded corners, but this will be harder. Actually Icon View is rendered through raw OpenGL and it is not that easy to do gradients and rounded corners.

[jgn]

Totalfinder 1.5.29 (not easy to find except by update) brings back the pre Mavericks labels. You should advertize it as such and not only in the release notes.

[darwin]

I will properly release it on stable channel with proper documentation soon. It just has to be tested by more people. This will bump TotalFinder version to 1.6 when it happens. Also I plan to drop Lion support at that point.

[jgn]

Darwin, it works very well for me, but I had to reboot a couple of times. Then everything was working fine. I am very happy with the addition, not asking for more documentation - it is quite clear in the pref. I was just stating that it should be more publicized. A lot of people will be happy and maybe turn to Totalfinder. Keep up the good work.

[darwin]

TotalFinder 1.5.30 is out with final fixes and rounded corners in Icon View! (@willynanita)
http://totalfinder.binaryage.com/beta-changes

Also created a dedicated documentation page:
http://totalfinder.binaryage.com/colored-labels

[willynanita]

Great, Thank You!

Can you make the corners more rounded? Like when you select a file or folder...

[darwin]

Unfortunately right now it is done via a trick. I cannot do rounded corners and gradient together. Right now it is implemented in a way that I draw top part with rounded corners without gradient, middle part with gradient and bottom part with rounded corners without gradient. Making those non-gradient sections bigger will make this trick more apparent.

[willynanita]

Fair enough!

Thanks.

[zm15]

THANK YOU!! You've had made a new customer in me, and I'm sure maaany others with this new implementation. Thank you

[mkormendy]

I love the color labels! The gradients are a bit of a detail from earlier skeuomorphic applications, but to be honest,... I rather a flat color myself. Easier to implement too.

[scottie1]

Great work. Can you also make the labels work on the desk top? I have most of the folders I work from sitting directly on the desktop, and I need the labels to show up there - instead of those weasley dots that I can barely see.

[ruudwelten]

Thank you for these recent changes!

Some ideas to improve the color labels in the future (you might already have these on your to do list ):

Black text: The text color for all columns but the filename in list view used to be black but now it is a lighter gray with anti-aliasing to white. This makes it less legible and if you could make the text black it would definitely improbe.
The anti-aliasing to white is also present in the filename column.
 

Remove old labels: Would it be possible to have the option in the settings to automatically disable older color labels? So a file or folder never has two color labels.

Custom colors: It would be great if custom color labels could be created in the settings. Let a user name it and input a color code (hex/rgb/sliders).

[darwin]

The text color for all columns but the filename in list view used to be black but now it is a lighter gray with anti-aliasing to white.

Good catch. This will be fixed in next release.

Would it be possible to have the option in the settings to automatically disable older color labels?

I cannot enforce this, because tags subsystem goes beyond Finder. It is a system-level feature. Right now colored label is defined as color of the last tag applied. I can imagine some external utility sitting in background and watching filesystem events and enforcing some rule like 'keep only most recent tag' or something similar. But this is beyond scope of TotalFinder I guess.

It would be great if custom color labels could be created in the settings. Let a user name it and input a color code (hex/rgb/sliders).

Tag colors can be possibly redefined via ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.labels.plist. But this is probably legacy feature which will go away in the next OS release. I don't know more details and I wasn't able to google some additional info.

Problems with tag colors

Just purchased TotalFinder for the return of fully colored tags/labels (and thanks for implementing that). I know the feature is still beta, but I’m having an issue I don’t see mentioned anywhere else: The color of the bar applied to my files is different than the color dot (which is colored as per the tag selected). [image] These are all newly created and tagged folders, but the behavior is the same as for existing folders already tagged. The folder at the top is set with the normal “Yello…

[Kimbakat]

Its very strange that Apple didn't consider people using full-on labels with Finder items to be used integrally into user's workspaces for file meaning and visual efficiency!

Makes us wonder why Apple isn't hiring it's biggest "users" versus fans to oversee their design department.

Sometimes there are people that want to make change just for the sake of change...whether it's better for the user or not. This is really bad way to change things.

If you want to see a good example of an editor that makes petty changes which are not for the betterment of a story..this one is a doozy.