Veterans of Mac OS 9.x will likely remember a Finder feature that allowed them to flag files with distinct colors. This made important files easy to locate and provided an easy way to segregate files without moving them to subfolders.

With the initial release of OS X, this feature was eliminated. Those of us who had made use of this simple feature were left in the cold to change our ways. Fortunately, this feature returned in OS X 10.3. Apple has heard our cries and responded with simple, powerful functionality.

As you can see from the screenshots above, the effectiveness remains the same, but the ease of selecting the label color has become even easier.

If you would like to customize the definition of each color, choose Preferences from under the Finder menu in the Finder. There you can designate a title that will be associated with each color tag.

And if you are looking for files with a certain Label attribute, you have the option to search for a given color in the Find window.

The Label is a simple, powerful feature. It was lost with the initial releases of OS X, but thankfully has been brought back into the fold. This is a good indication that, while Apple forges new ground with its UNIX based OS, it has not forgotten some of the simple innovations that were developed along the way. For many of us, it was simple innovations like these that made us choose the Mac in the first place.