Recently-launched “Tags” is designed to bring a little organization into that chaotic world of yours. Essentially, the application allows you to tag emails, photos, documents and more and allows you to do so while you’re either working within the file (in one of the many supported applications) or perusing files via Finder.

What’s great about Tags lies not only with the fact that it can aide in the organization of hundreds, if not thousands, of your files but also in its simplicity. How might you go about tagging a document? Why, Ctrl+Space of course. That’s it. Keying the shortcut again will switch to a search mode that will allow you to easily find files with certain keywords attached. (This follows in the footsteps of many great applications bringing pure-wonderfulness via a simple shortcut; Google Desktop and Launchy being two apps off of the top of my head.)

(Note: I would have embedded the screencast here in order to provide you with a bit more information about the product but, unfortunately, it was only available as a QuickTime .mov – and I’ll have no part of that mess.)

The app, in the aging tradition of 3rd-party software titles for Mac OS, will require a little green to get started: $29 to be precise. It’s a small price to pay for sanity.

Windows Users: basic tagging functionality is built into Windows 7/Vista for certain file types but for an application similar to the Tags app mentioned above, Windows devotees can turn to tag2find, a small freeware application that, unfortunately, lost funding in 2008. However, according to the official site, there are plans to open tag2find up to the community through an upcoming open-source version.

[via Apple Downloads]

If you’re one of those people that reads their email in multiple locations (say, on the Web with Gmail then on your desktop with Outlook) then I’m sure you’ve noticed that some, nay, alot of messages get butchered in one client but look perfectly fine in another.

This is typically a result of two separate problems. First, the developers of the email message that you received perhaps didn’t use Web standards when composing it. Alternatively, the email authors may have done everything right and composed the message using the most modern standards possible but the developers of your email client don’t know what they’re doing. It’s 50/50 for me… I’ve experienced both the former and the latter equally, I do believe.
Regardless of where the problem originated, there is a solution: agreeing to a set of standards and sticking to them.

That’s where the "Email Standards Project" comes in.

The goal of the Email Standards Project is to work with both the design community (to help them "understand why standards are so important for email") and email client developers (to "ensure that emails render consistently.")

More information is available at email-standards.org including info on how you can help with the project. You can even find up-to-date ratings of current email clients like Google’s Gmail (FAIL), Windows Live Mail (WIN) and, of course, everybody’s favorite email client: Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 (you guessed it: FAIL – most likely because it uses Microsoft Word as a rendering engine).

The tests are based on the ever-infamous acid test and go into detail as to what displays properly in the client and what doesn’t.

It’s a noble cause in my personal opinion and I sincerely hope that both Google and Microsoft invest a little more time and money into ensuring that some of their most popular products follow a set of reasonable standards… something that even Mozilla’s Thunderbird can offer.

Microsoft is now accepting applications for “Windows Gurus” that will eventually staff the Redmond-based company’s first-ever round of brick-and-mortar stores in the U.S. Think you’re qualified? Here’s Microsoft’s way of determining whether or not you are:

Do your friends and family turn to you when they want to learn more about their PCs? Do you relish the chance to teach them how PCs can improve their lives and do things they never before thought possible? In your free time, do you turn to your PC for fun-or just to create or learn something new?

Of course, there are additional questions* to be answered in their official online job application, but, If you’re interested, you can learn more at msretaillive.com. They’ve also set up a specialized E-mail address, jobs [at] mswindowsguru.com that you can contact if you have questions about the position(s).

Currently, MS is seeking various individuals located in different cities within the following states: CA, FL, MA, MD, MN, NH, NJ, NV, NY, VA, WA and in Washington D.C.. So, if it sounds interesting, check out the site to find out more. Who knows? You could find yourself working full-time (for $20/hr – here’s the link again) at Microsoft’s version of the Apple Store.

Source: The Sean Blog (Microsoft TechNet Blogs)

*Additional questions include: do you have experience using Apple Macs? When was the last time you shopped for a new computer? What OS are you using at home/work? What type of Internet service are you using at home? (Hint: answer “dial-up” and you probably won’t get the job.) And, of course, the classic: “Have you been convicted of a felony in the past 7 years?”

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I can only imagine what it must have been like at 6pm CST on Microsoft’s main campus in Redmond, WA.  I’m picturing alot of long faces and cursing/throwing of chairs.  But not at building 117.  There, Microsoft is hard-at-work building their own rival to Apple’s latest toy.  On NBC’s Today show this morning, they took a tour of building 117 and got a sneak peek at what exactly Microsoft has in mind for an iPhone competitor.

The tour provided a quick glimpse at a potential new interface for the device (pictured to your left) and details about what Microsoft aims to provide with it, including: enhanced Office-functionality (beyond that of what we can see in today’s Smartphones,) GPS functionality (including being able to receive e-coupons as you drive/walk past a building’s location,) and the implementation of the MS Research Labs project “Lincoln.”

Lincoln, announced earlier this year, enables you to take a picture of an object using your phone’s camera and immediately locate that item online for purchase.  In the tour, NBC took a snapshot of the movie Babel on DVD which brought back immediate results from an Amazon-esque online store.

The crew also touched on another of Microsoft’s Research projects: Surface.  Placing the mobile phone on the Surface display, the crew was able to drop photos from the Surface PC onto the phone just by gliding their finger.

It’s not clear when we can expect this new mobile device but we can probably say that there’s definitely quite a bit of Red Bull flowing through building 117.

Update: I neglected to mention yesterday that the Microsoft TechNet blog hyperlinked at the beginning of the article (with the words “Microsoft is hard-at-work”) is claiming that there’s a big surprise coming on Wednesday for iPhone users.  Exchange integration, perhaps?

“And watch this space for more excitement about the iPhone! :) Guaranteed you’ll love your iPhone even more starting next Wednesday… ;)

Want to guess what it is???”

You’ll know as soon as we know.

Apple today released the public beta of its’ Safari Web browser.  The unique aspect of today’s release, as you might have guessed from this post’s title, is that a Windows version of the beta was released as well.  With the exception of the Quicktime/iTunes combo, this, as far as I can recall, is the only other software application that Apple has released for the Windows platform in recent history.

Safari, of course, is just the latest in a long, long, long line of Windows-based Web browsers including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Flock.  So, why does Apple think you should use it on your XP/Vista machine?  Speed.  As far as I can tell, this seems to be the only major difference between Safari and its’ many other competitors.  As an example, Apple claims that Safari “loads pages up to 2 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2.“  We did a test here and noticed that some of the pages we were pulling up in Safari were, in fact, coming up faster than they were in Firefox.

However, being able to pull up cnn.com 200 milliseconds faster (that’s 0.2 seconds, people) doesn’t seem to be worth giving up the plethora of Firefox extensions that are available to me.  Nor do I feel that it’s worth giving up my beloved Ctrl+Enter, Shift+Enter and Ctrl+Shift+Enter shortcuts for entering addresses.*  Other than the speed factor, Safari also includes everything we’ve come to expect from a modern browser including tabbed browsing, a pop-up blocker, and even something Microsoft has YET to comprehend: inline search.  Again, Firefox has it covered there as well.

I might also add that this beta release includes some graphic display issues (ironic, huh?) that one might not expect from a public beta; perhaps an alpha release, but not a beta, and certainly not from Apple – a company known for smooth graphics in its’ apps and OS.  Of course, this is a very minor issue and shouldn’t prevent you from giving the browser a test if you’ve been wanting to.

*While in Firefox, type in “google” in the address bar.  Instead of hitting “enter,” try the combinations I referred to instead.  Hitting “Ctrl+Enter” will automatically add the “http://” and “.com” to your address and take you to the page.  “Shift+Enter” adds the same prefix but takes you to the “.net” TLD.  And, as you might presume, “Ctrl+Shift+Enter” would take you to Google’s philanthropic site located at the “.org” TLD.

Update: Apple also previewed the latest version of the Mac OS X OS, Leopard at WWDC which boasts over 300 new features including:

“…a new Desktop and Dock with Stacks, an intuitive new way to organize files; an updated Finder featuring Cover Flow™ and a new way to easily browse and share files between multiple Macs; Quick Look, a new way to rapidly preview most files without opening an application; Time Machine, a new way to easily and automatically back up and restore lost files or a complete Mac®; Spaces, a powerful new feature to create groups of applications and instantly switch between them; and enhanced iChat and Mail applications, which easily allow users to communicate even more creatively.”

Check out the complete press release at Apple.com: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/06/11leopard.html.