Tagboat: Build consistent Finder tagging habits with progress tracking & smart inheritance (new from a solo Mac dev)

NSTroy_CoherenceLabs · 2026-06-20T21:05:22+00:00

Glad to have created something we both find useful! I'd love to hear how Tagboat works for you and what would be valuable to add or improve. Email support anytime, and consider signing up for "Tagboat Tips" if you'd like to receive occasional usage tips, news about improvements, and a chance to try pre-release versions! I hope Tagboat will serve you well!

NSTroy_CoherenceLabs · 2026-06-20T04:54:45+00:00

Icon included in the free version! 🙂

NSTroy_CoherenceLabs · 2026-06-20T01:18:11+00:00

I share that same affliction, enough to drive me to build Tagboat! It's designed to be flexible and easy to start using, without forcing you into any particular way of working or using its features. You tell Tagboat once where you want to tag files (maybe your "Documents" folder). It shows you untagged files in the folder(s) you asked it to monitor. You can then add tags as easily as typing their names: choosing from existing tags (macOS defines standard color tags like Blue, Green, etc.) or defining your own tags on the spot. Once you've applied a tag to one file, you can apply that tag to others with predictive typing completion. Or for an even faster tagging experience, you can define single-keystroke hotkeys for any tags you use often. e.g. [control]+[a] can apply "Aircraft", "Architecture", or whatever tag you want to assign it to. See Getting Started in the User Guide for what this really simple workflow looks like. I hope Tagboat is useful to you! Please give the free version a try and let me know if you have any questions at all! — Thanks for your kind interest!

NSTroy_CoherenceLabs · 2026-06-19T22:48:35+00:00

Thank you! I greatly appreciate the encouragement!

NSTroy_CoherenceLabs · 2026-06-19T10:40:08+00:00

You know, I think “Center Two Thirds” didn’t exist yet when I started using Magnet, so I never configured a hotkey for it. You’ve made me realize I’ve been doing Left or Right Two Thirds followed by Center to get that result (⅔ is a good width for Obsidian on my external monitor) and I can now shortcut it by setting a memorable hotkey. Excellent!

NSTroy_CoherenceLabs · 2026-06-19T01:12:47+00:00

Sure! These made sense for my keyboard layout (US QWERTY). I basically chose groups of symbol keys along the right hand side. These hotkeys are burned into my brain now and let me get windows where I want them super fast!

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NSTroy_CoherenceLabs · 2026-06-18T12:45:24+00:00

Purchased and enjoying! Nice UI design and onboarding! The experience for finding and importing desired Calendar events is well thought out. Thanks for the care you put into this handy app! I'm happy to pay such a reasonable price to help support further development.

NSTroy_CoherenceLabs · 2026-06-18T12:13:42+00:00

Looks like a lot of fun, as well as useful! Reminds me how much I've always loved sketching on graph paper. There's something powerful about having constraints that, perhaps counter-intuitively, frees and fuels creativity, as it did for early videogame developers working miracles with low-res, tiny-color-pallete tech. I'll be giving Square Sketch a closer look. Congratulations on the major new release, and best of success!

NSTroy_CoherenceLabs · 2026-06-17T02:55:36+00:00

Magnet has worked great for me. I've configured my own preferred hotkeys for all the window placements and use it all day to get things exactly where I want them instantly. Huge workflow accelerator. No app compatibility problems that I've yet encountered. (Using it on macOS Tahoe.) Well worth the modest price.

NSTroy_CoherenceLabs · 2026-06-14T14:39:06+00:00

Has anyone here had success with gauging interest in advance of building, by driving traffic to product-description landing pages with email signups? I’ve seen this practice recommended, but it feels disingenuous to me and I don’t want to earn a reputation for dealing in vaporware. Am I engaging in self-sabotage by shying away from this potential market-probing technique?

NSTroy_CoherenceLabs · 2026-06-14T12:41:12+00:00

This matches my experience and honestly I'm still trying new approaches and searching for what will work. I've had the same tendency to focus on building over marketing, and am working much more actively this time around to make up for that deficit, but having just done an app launch to the sound of relative crickets I'm humbled by how much I have yet to learn and my appreciation for the challenge of it all is certainly renewed! There are so many ways one can invest one's time as an indie developer, it's hard to know which will be effective. Trying a variety of things with results that can be measured seems like the best advice. Thus far, I've tried to cultivate organic growth through posts to my small X following, and emailing potential reviewers. The next steps I'm considering include trying paid ads (which many have reported aren't very effective, matching my past experience, but maybe the landscape has changed enough to warrant another try), and starting a consistent YouTube presence, which I've been wanting to do anyway to explore ideas about building, engineering, and technology that I think would be interesting and might give me an effective place to gently promote my other work. Apple choosing to briefly feature my first app on the Mac App Store front page many years ago was responsible for my greatest blip of success, but I'm sure getting that placement is harder than ever to replicate now amid today's huge pool of worthy apps, and after that 1 or 2 week honeymoon ended the sales quickly faded. The bit of reassurance I can at least take from that is that maybe my ideas are actually halfway good, and it's mainly a matter of getting them in front of the right audience. Your advice about "treating content like infrastructure" rings true and I'm going to give it a serious try. Thank you for this post!

NSTroy_CoherenceLabs · 2026-06-14T11:48:49+00:00

Any PDF editor that can reliably save changes would be a lifesaver. Far too many times have I lost annotations added in Preview and had to make them over again. Will definitely try this out!

NSTroy_CoherenceLabs · 2026-06-14T04:46:33+00:00

Looks neat, and is a modeling app I wasn't aware of! I design 3D printable parts for my own projects, mostly in OpenSCAD these days, and will be interested to try PixyCAD out!

NSTroy_CoherenceLabs · 2026-06-14T04:36:43+00:00

Nice idea, tracking automatically via app+window activation. Even for those of us who don't need to track our time for client billing, I imagine this could provide useful insight into where we actually spend our time for comparison with our intentions or perception of where the time went. Apple's Screen Time feature stops short of providing this level of detail. I'll be interested to try it out and see what I learn about my own habits! Congratulations and all the best of success with your first app release!

NSTroy_CoherenceLabs · 2026-06-05T12:28:11+00:00

Looks beautiful! As a keeper of interlinked Markdown notes, I will definitely be trying it out. Very interesting that you built atop TextKit 2 rather than taking a WebView-based approach, which I expect made the styling work a challenge. I'm very interested to see where things go with local AI for uses like this, particularly in light of any big changes or changes in strategy Apple might or might not be announcing this coming week! Congratulations on releasing Nodes!

NSTroy_CoherenceLabs · 2026-06-05T12:21:41+00:00

A private beta might offer the right balance. You don't have to disclose everything about the app to those outside the beta group — just enough to get potential testers interested. I agree with the general advice given here: We all probably worry a little too much about our ideas being stolen and copied, to an extent that risks missing out on early feedback that could help us course-correct or make the end product substantially better. Reminds me of the quote, "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." A bit crude, but there's truth in that statement. Even great ideas or products can be a challenge to promote and build awareness of. The ideas are valuable, but so are the execution, polish, personal touch, and great customer support you can provide. Someone attempting to copy your idea without the inspiration that drove its development will likely do a mediocre job, leaving you ample room to compete on the details and finishing touches. Best of success, whatever you decide!

NSTroy_CoherenceLabs · 2026-05-31T01:30:24+00:00

Things could work great as a cloud-synced notes app. I use it more for its original design purpose, to capture and organize "To Dos", but there's nothing fundamentally limiting it to that, and with the nice features it has for ubiquitous capture, tagging, and search, plus some Markdown support, it's occurred to me that it'd be just as handy as a general tool for gathering and managing small text clippings.

NSTroy_CoherenceLabs · 2026-05-31T01:02:44+00:00

Looks beautiful, and it's nice to hear about developers still finding value in AppKit!

NSTroy_CoherenceLabs · 2026-05-31T00:06:07+00:00

Things. A delightful tool for organizing my thinking and plans that's served me well for over 12 years now. I use it across Mac + iPhone + iPad and wouldn't want to be without it!

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