14 DAY TRIAL // Labels have always been a useful tool, letting you quickly glance at a long list of files and tell what is what. Their initial absence from OS X was received with mixed feelings, and fortunately enough, they made a comeback quickly and are here to stay.
Now labels themselves, I have always considered perfectly fine as they were, simple colors associated with something that is relevant to you. Of course, there are still differences between how they worked in Classic and how they work in OS X, with the former coloring the icon of the labeled item and the latter adding a colored background to the name. Personally, of the two, I prefer the OS X approach, as it is equally good no mater whether you are viewing the content as icons, lists or columns, however, there are undoubtedly others out there that would prefer the colored icon. OS X does not give you a choice in this matter; however, there is third party software that will let you do this and more, such as Emblematic.
What it does
In a nutshell, Emblematic is a label stylizing application that will let you tweak the look and behavior of labels in ways that are not normally possible. This tweaking ranges from adding badges to icons, coloring the icon according to the labels and even making sounds whenever a label is applied.
Working with it
Emblematic comes in the form of a preference pane, which is a good choice considering that it changes the labels and these are system wide. Once you install it you are ready to go and start messing with it.
Unfortunately, there is no documentation included, and the developer's site could not be accessed because of "data transfer restrictions." On the other hand, the program is quite simple and straightforward to grasp, despite the very atypical OS X button layout.
Once it is installed, working with Emblematic is simply a matter of choosing the label to work on and then making the desired changes to it. Once the changes are applied, any file or folder that will be given the label will reflect the changes, however, files that already had that label might not get updates immediately, requiring a restart or some other stimulation.
Emblems
Emblems are the main things that Emblematic lets you add to labels. They are basically an image that will be overlaid on top of whatever icon the item you are applying a label has.
Simply select any of the images at the bottom of the preference pane and drag it onto the label sample at the top left corner of the window. From here on it is a matter of tweaking it to match what you like. Unfortunately, the size and angle tool leaves a lot to be desired, especially when it comes to resizing. The algorithms used yield very poor results when resizing images with the smaller version being badly pixilated. The same goes for rotating images which makes any straight edges tear like anything. Of course, the results are poorest when both shrinking and rotating an image, resulting in something that would give graphic designers nightmares. Amazingly enough, the shear tool works very well with minimal tearing and hardly any pixelating.
On the topic of the emblems themselves, they are quite acceptable, but I have found no way to add your own images to them. Also, it seems you can download new ones from the developer's site, which unfortunately could not be accessed because of their "data transfer restrictions." Even so, there is quite a wide palette of choice, and the developer was even kind enough to include a very artistic image of dog poop, which is great for anyone who makes use of a brown label.
Additional options
Besides adding emblems, there are also certain things you can do to the icon of an item that has a label, namely, colorize it. Enabling this and not adding any emblem will make the labels act exactly as those in Classic did. For those wanting the emblem, you can also opt to do several things, such as colorize the emblem to match the label, or colorize the shadow.
There are also two very amusing sound option you can play with. The first makes a plopping sound every time you add a label to an item, which the developer associates with the sound of slapping an emblem on. As I found that sound particularly annoying, and it cannot be changed, it was one of the first things I disabled. Much of the same can be said for the option to speak the name of the label using the built in OS X text to speech.
The Good
Lets you change the ways labels look and behave to suit your taste. Quite easy to use and flexible enough to let you make a label look just about any way you like it.
The Bad
Resize and rotate tool makes the emblems look damned ugly, while the program itself is quite tied in with the developer's site, which seems to not be working.
The Truth
If you want your labels to be the way they were, or you want to add emblems to them as well as sounds and other effects, this is the ideal program to do it.
Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:
