Posted by Ryan on Thursday, June 8 @ 9:14 AM
After putting in a lot of work to remake Meta into a faster, more responsive application, Pete and I are announcing the release of Meta 2.
For this release we've totally rewritten the search system to make Meta as fast, responsive, and robust as possible. We've also redesigned the search window to be more aerodynamic, for a handsomer user experience.
In addition, we changed the trial period so that now new users get the standard 15 days to try Meta before they buy. It's a free upgrade for 1.x users.
So to you, the current and soon-to-be users of Meta: Download Meta 2 and rediscover (or discover for the first time) how powerful desktop searching can be. Use "and"s and "or"s to your heart's content. Search only in the folders from which you want results. Slap down some metafolders for quick access to your searches at a later date. It's all there, and it's all fast and handsome.
Posted by Ryan on Friday, May 12 @ 9:33 AM
Today we're posting the installer for version 1.02 of Meta. We're really happy with it because it's much more responsive than previous versions have been, and we think that the improved responsiveness will make it that much more useful. This is a free upgrade for anyone who already has a license for 1.0 or 1.01. Download it now!
Posted by Ryan on Friday, April 28 @ 6:00 PM
Pete and I are pleased to announce that Big Robot is now open for business! The site is up and the software is ready for downloading. It's kind of like the first day a downtown bakery is open for business: some of the displays aren't quite finished, and a few things still need a final coat of paint, but the public is free to stop in and say hi, or buy some hand-made software. Mmmm... smells fresh!
Posted by Ryan on Thursday, April 20 @ 10:20 PM
Spotlight tagging is an easy way to use "tags" to categorize the files on your computer that goes well beyond what you're able to do with directories in the Finder. What Flickr and del.icio.us let you do with pictures and bookmarks, respectively, you can do with your own files using Spotlight tagging. Unfortunately, neither the Finder nor Apple's Spotlight interface make it easy or convenient to tag your files.
Pete has written a brief and concise tutorial explaining how you can use Meta to make Spotlight tagging convenient and efficient. Buy your copy at a newsstand today, or even better, read it for free on our web site!
Posted by Ryan on Tuesday, March 28 @ 7:17 PM
Ok, so it's not that big a deal for a pre-1.0 application, written from scratch in the latest version of XCode, using pure Cocoa with Objective-C, to go from being a PowerPC-only application to a Universal Binary application, but I thought it was worth mentioning. Henceforth, let it be mentioned across the land: Meta is a Universal Binary application!
What does this mean? Not that much. It just means that Meta will run natively on every computer currently sold at the Apple Store, seeing not "Intel Macs" and "PowerPC Macs", only seeing "Macs". For more information on Apple's Universal Binary designation, here's Apple's Universal Binary page, and here's Wikipedia's Universal Binary entry.
Posted by Ryan on Sunday, March 12 @ 8:47 PM
This weekend I spent some time transmuting our help book html files from dowdy, un-exciting unstyled html into sinful and curvaceously-styled articles of helpful wickedness. That is to say, the help materials that get installed as part of Meta went from being ugly to being not-quite-ugly, and mostly-readable. It took me a while to do, but it needed to be done so as to not scare users away when they try to access the built-in help system, and it was good for the help materials overall to have spent another handful of hours reviewing them. They shine a little more now. All we need to do now is add some screenshots where necessary, and the help book will be 100% complete.
And since I know that I don't always go to an application's help book first, and sometimes try to glean what I need from the developer's web site, rest assured that we're going to put the help book up on our web site here. That way your Google searches will find the info you're looking for about the workings of Meta. It'll be linked to from the Support page, but I'm not sure where yet.
