Literature and Latte

Great to see this new feature implemented. Some questions about how to use it:

- Once a new metadata field is created, is there a way to add (or update) the same value in a group of items? I guess many users with a project underway might need this in order to start using the feature.

- What format can metadata fields be? Just text, or could they be numbers, dates, yes/no, lists?

- How does search work with custom metadata? Can I do a search that returns all instances of a value in a specified metadata field?

- Can I create (and keep) a dynamic collection based on the content of a metadata field?

- Can a collection be ordered based on the values in a metadata field? (eg if a metadata field had a number, could a collection based on that field be viewed in numerical order?)

Custom meta-data can only be added individually per item at the moment; it's just a text field, so you can type in it whatever you want, which could include numbers, but there's no special handling of those numbers to recognise them as dates or such. You can run a project search on "Custom Meta-Data" as a whole, but not currently for individual fields. (You could put a unique identifier in the text so you can artificially isolate the search to a single meta-data field by searching "All Words".) Search collections are always given in binder order, so you would need to convert the list to a standard collection and then manually order it to base it on any other value.

We to have plans to further develop custom meta-data much along these lines, but that's a bit away still with a lot of work to go into it to get the design and implementation right. The custom meta-data features we're introducing in 1.7 bring Windows up to speed with the Mac version, so anything new from there needs work on both platforms.