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Examining Mac OS X 10.4's Spotlight
Ton writes "Apple has published a discussion of Spotlight, the radical systemwide search technology that will be part of Mac OS X 10.4 'Tiger'. The really interesting part is that metadata will be playing a big role in Spotlight while just a few years ago people were afraid metadata in Mac OS X was going the way of the dodo."
Try to pretend that you're managing 2 or 3 or more major projects that can change or be passed along to someone else every few months with mails, im's, files, reports you don't look at, media submitted by other people in different countries, to-do lists and other project management data...
Now imagine someone asks you, the project manager (or just the last person still around) on a project from 3 years ago, what the initial proposal from that guy in japan who did the Flash files was versus what we paid him and what the VP's said about that....
People *will* have copies of these files still floating around *somewhere* in e-mail or im history, at least. You may not, I may not, but that's where this will come in handy.
A few years ago, hd space was not large enough to think that you'd keep all that data around, but gmail's new 1Gb e-mail storage just showcases the lack of a need to dump all that crap off your media if you can just organize it well, and who needs that when you can keyword search, anyway?
MetaData is not new. Its not radical. But MS aparently can't make it work. So Apple gets to use it first, 5 percent of the computer population go wow! 95 percent ask why can't we have this, and Longhorn SP1 will get it and proclaim it as a great new radical technology.
Nowhere does anyone say that Spotlight using metadata is radical, or that metadata itself is radical.
The metadata part was noteworthy because MacOS has always had metadata, but Apple looked like it was abandoning, or at least deprecating the concept in OS X. The fact that Spotlight will use it shows that metadata on MacOS still has a future.
Advanced users are users too!
You've got to give them credit for product design as well. Nobody makes more desirable-looking software and hardware. Is it any wonder that Apple's fiercest supporters are graphic designers?
I suggest the value of search depends on what you use your computer for and maybe how good your memory is. To me it is tremendously important. Most of my job is spent managing information. Searching for things and adding things to my knowledge base. I love Google's Desktop search for this reason. I also use blinkx, but prefer the google UI implementation. Months or years after something was written, I need to go find it. I may not know if it was ppt, xls, doc, pdf, or xml. I may not have written. I may not have even read it, but I need to find it.
;-).
Increasingly I find that mult-media files matter. MP3 recordings of meetings, images of whiteboards, videos of presentatons are all fair game. (My hobbies include photography and genealogy. So findings pictures of people and places, correlated with GPS tracklogs is also of interest.)
I also find that, although I structure my file system according to something that makes sense initially, it won't be the way I want to search for it later. I usually file things accordning to client and project. But later I may need to 'find all system specifications where the DRP recovery time requirement was longer than 30 minutes'. This kind of search would require a lot of my time.
I need way better search, way better meta-data (which means system created because people don't), and more disk space
When I first saw the spotlight demo, I was thrilled. A very small step to help me with my job.
QuickTime player may not have been ground breaking, but the entirety of the framework was.
Name one other multimedia framework that has been around as long as Quicktime. And don't mention Video for Windows...I'll take your response off the air.
The kind of metadata that was almost deprecated by Apple isn't quite same thing as the "modern" concept of metadata. The classical HFS metadata covered concepts like file type, file creator, and "Finder bits" that aren't handled at the file system level in other OSes. This, combined, with the Mac OS's historical use of resource forks for storing developer defined data records, made perserving such data difficult or impossible in heterogenous environments like the Internet. It's really a shame; I've always thought this concept was the most elegant attempt to solve the problem of "rich data" associated with data files without requiring the data in the file itself to have some form of universal container format.
The metadata concept used by Spotlight is going to be based in part on a plug-in system that allows the Mac OS to reconstruct metadata information from the data within files themselves, rather than just using the metadata facilities provided by HFS and Mac OS resource forks. That means that each different kind of file, from Word documents to PDFs to Postscript jobs, needs its own special kind of processing to read its own format of storing such data. It's less elegant and more processor intensive that just using the historical HFS system, but it's more likely to to be useful for extracting metadata from files provided by Windows and other Unix variant users.
Those who complain about affect & effect on
Filesystem metadata is great, but "instantly" updated search indexes sounds like a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist.
Doesn't exist *for you* perhaps. Perhaps you don't have a lots of user data, or you have taken time to sort it into useful folders. I'd say it's about as useful as the incremental seach in iTunes is. Sure I could remember what artist did a track, and access a track by scrolling down to that artist, then finding the track. Or I could scroll down the list of thousands of track names, remembering my alphabet ordering, and locate the track that way. Assuming I've remembered the exact wording of track name. But I've always found it easier to type whatever word comes to mind first from artist or track into the search box.
And so it is with documents. Even if I do remember the file name and folder that a particular piece of information is stored in, I still need to navigate there. Most times it will be quicker just to type in whatever it is you remember about the data you want into a search box - even if you know where the data is stored.
There's been reference from the beginning of the computer revolution to this solution we've all been waiting for... and credit to evolutionary steps taken by apps such as,Quicksilver, Launchbar, BeOS, etc... but one application that predates AND which most closely matches the feature set is:
Simson Garfinkle's "Sbook.app" from NeXT in the 90's.
The usefulness of Sbook.app ability to add tokens in a flat file for instantaneous searches enabled people to apply Sbook.app outside its realm of address book that it originally was designed.
Abstracting its functionality and interoperating at the kernel level is pure Apple polish on the brand. Until people start using "Spotlight", the verdict will be out on adoption across the platform.
I will venture it will be one of the defining characteristics of the Mac platform into the future.
If you have a mac with a ton of files, various "Previous System Folders" etc...follow along :)
I have smart folders for pdfs, avis, mpgs, and wmvs
I have these sorts of files *all over the place*...movie clips, test files, you name it.
I go to the finder, "open" the Windows Media Files folder, and they are all "there"
Or all the "archive" files (zip, rar, sit/sitx etc) i've collected and not erased in the last year...
or all of the emails i've received from japanese users...
it goes on and on.
To me, its like the whole star trek "Computer..find all of the blah blah blah for sector Whatever"
It concentrates on the "what you want" as opposed to the current paradigm of where did i pit it/what app did i use, etc