description

A very simple cocoa app for editing PDF metadata. Hooks into Spotlight for the educational value to me.

motivation

We bought a Fujitsu ScanSnap which is freaking awesome. You put a bunch of paper in the top, and PDFs pop out on your computer. If there’s stuff on both sides, it scans boths sides at once. Its genius.

With this little baby we’ve almost cleared out all the accumulated junk from our filing cabinet. This of course means that we now have a huge number of PDFs on our computer. We need to organise them.

Preview.app can add keywords to PDF files, but the interface is pretty unwieldy.

All this talk about to-everything bucket-or-not and openmeta made me want to look into the whole OS X metadata thing.

As it turns out, there’s a whole lot of yummy tech happening just under the surface, just beyond the reach of the developer. Typically Apple.

mechanics

So anyway. I built this wee app to have a look around.

As it turns out, since I’m just dealing with PDFs I can use the PDFKit api and don’t have to worry about breaking the space time continuum as openmeta is accused of doing.

You just read the PDF file, touch up its attributes and write it back. Spotlight notices (via FSEvents) and re-indexes it straight away.

After that you can use finder smart folders to be smart n stuff.

Although Bindings is still a little elusive to me, I’m getting there finally!

todo

1. add prefs
2. unhardcode the path it reads
3. add some processed/unprocessed logic
4. add some searching
5. add some grouping (might just leave it to finder though)

license

Copyright 2009 Lachie Cox

Licensed to you under the MIT license.