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Apple and MS Battle For Desktop Search Supremacy
markmcb writes "As Microsoft and Apple go back and forth about who came up with what idea first, it's been hard to tell who the real innovaters are. Michael Gartenberg and Jim Allchin of Microsoft give some fair opinions on the current desktop search battle. While they do give credit to Apple's iTunes for search inspiration and to Apple being first out of the box in the OS race, they both imply that Microsoft will provide more robust features with the release of Longhorn."
Uhh--- the first real mainstream desktop search I started to see people use was...
Google Desktop Search?
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
What, you mean like smart folders, that automatically detect when you add a new file of a certain type, anywhere on your hard drive, and add it to the virtual folder? Oops, Tiger has that.
Smart folders WILL change the way you use your computer. There's no need to hunt through folders for a certain document, as all organization can be done at a smart folder level. Plainly put, it doesn't MATTER where your data is stored in the file structure, smart folders will allow you to organize everything easily and quickly. Just like file systems make it where you don't care where the bits lie on the disk, smart folders will make it where you don't care where the files lie in the directory structure. This is a BIG improvement.
Of course, you didn't actually bother to think about the point you were attempting to make, because you were rushing to get your post near the beginning of the dicsussion so it could be modded up.
My guess is that Joe Average can't remember if he saved Important.doc to C:\, C:\My Documents, C:\Documents and Settings\JAverage\My Documents, N:\, or to the Start Menu/whereever else inexperienced users tend to save things.
"Instead of being a static graphic indicating the type of document a file is, an icon in Longhorn will be a smaller representation of the first page of a document." ... so I'll have to read the filenames carefully if I'm trying to grab all the .pdf's I've made of my Word documents if they're in the same directory! Wheee, thanks!
BeOS , it had file metadata support years ago and worked well with it . .in an MS vs apple fight since Tiger comes out in 10 days and longhorn comes out god knows when, its pretty one sided and apple wins hands down
not to mention the other companys that have since been making products of this nature
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Yes, but see, that takes your time. It used to be (and still is, like in the system you describe above) that finding something on a computer required an investment of time: either that time was used beforehand, ensuring proper organization, or at the time of the search - wading through poorly organized folders, duplicates, old files, etc...
But now, the promise of these tools - in theory - is that we can eliminate this investment of time. We can drop file wherever we want to, and the searching is instantaneous, by whatever bit of criteria we happen to need, conceive, or have access to, at the time of search.
It's not perfect, though: I know that my sense of organization has devolved since I started using Quicksilver, and that is sometimes a problem, when I am forced to go manually through folders. Heh, who knows - maybe Apple will release some sort of Spotlight -> Automator transition that allows people to use spotlight queries to actually reorganize their data permanently, not smart folder this and query that, but actually reorganize data in the filesystem based on certain things (kind of like how iTunes manages the folders in its library folder.)
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
"However, its implementation(Apples) is not as universal as what Microsoft is proposing."
So what does this really mean? Apple already does this but Microsoft promises to NOT ONLY do exactly the same, but have improved uppon the ideer by their next release.
We have an OS versus a Proposal. How can it be they declare the proposal the winner? By that time chances are OSX will have evolved just a tad bit. It takes less time to develop a feature already implimenten then it does starting from the bottom. Even if you do have somthing to copycat.
About Yahoo! Desktop Search
Yeah, but think about it - with desktop search, if you want to go after a file, just type the name, or some content related to it.
You can do this already with the search tools already built into Windows XP. Just type the name, part of the name, or search by type of file.
I don't see that this new "desktop search" thing is going to do anything other than teach people how to be disorganized. So now you can put any file anywhere you want without even knowing where it physically is on a disk. Big deal. The point is the OS still knows where it is, and what happens when something invariably gets erased either through user error or a system crash? You erase a folder now and you (should) know exactly what's in it. With the system they're talking about, you'd just lose a bunch of random files and you'd be coming across stuff you didn't even know you'd lost years after the fact (you'd only figure it out when you actually searched for those files, and you'd probably wonder why the search function is not coming up with anything).
I think the desktop metaphor not only still works fine, it is also necessary. There is real utility in knowing exactly where your OS thinks a file or folder really is - not just smart-search pseudo-folders that automatically update themselves based on your criteria (a neat idea, but this should be an addition to the desktop metaphor, not a replacement for it).
Tweaks and helpful features are one thing, but there's no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater like MS is talking about here. I sincerely hope there will be an option to just keep using your system the way we always have.
Remember how Windows XP turned off things like file extensions by default? Remember how the first thing you did when you got Windows XP, along with everybody else in the world, was to turn them back on? I feel like that's the sort of thing MS is trying to foist upon us again.
New search functions are fine. But I don't need to learn a completely new way of doing things on the desktop. My desktop - and my PC - works perfectly well as it is.
No, iTunes will keep its own database for the obvious reason: It's cross-platform. We have to ship an iTunes for Windows, which means we have to have an internal database anyway.
iTunes 5 will get the benefits of the souped-up V100 database, though, so searching will be even faster. (This won't affect you unless you have hundreds of thousands of songs in your library.)
Some people really believe that Windows is pretty up to par with OSX and will go after this point. Check out these comments from ComputerWorld (poor magazine IMO). For record, I don't like the magazine or agree with any of this:
"Mac OS X may be a nice-looking overlay to Unix, but it still leaves much to be desired. For example, networking in an environment where multiple servers are used is decidedly flaky, permissions must be changed to do simple things like adding fonts or nonstandard printers, and administrative access is difficult."
"...the view from the trenches is that Windows will be the way to go until an OS that is as user- and admin-friendly comes around."
And another:
"A couple of years after the release of Win 95, I attended an Apple event celebrating the new features in Mac OS 8.0. As I sat watching this operating system version that offered full-screen wallpaper (a feature of Win 3.1), Internet options (catching up with Win 95), systemwide sound effects (another Win 3.1 feature) and more, I said to the longtime Mac user sitting beside me that this was Apple's attempt to maintain parity with Windows 95."
Web "integration" was there out of the box and was the Big Deal with Sherlock. It was such a Big Deal that it was integrated as a tab into the System-level "Find" command to augment it. Sherlock didn't search your hard drive, it searched the internets.
Oh, and it had banner ads.
This was nicely unobtrusive until OS 9, at which point Apple made Sherlock the Find command and replaced the simple, clean interface with the bloated "brushed metal" that we see to this day. Same functionality as previous incarnations with a more OMG TEH INTERNETS!!!! emphasis.
Oh, and it had banner ads. AND it was big and ugly. So I hauled in my "sherlock" from 8.6 and used that with my powerbook until I switched over to OS X.
And I didn't do that until they peeled Sherlock back into a separate app (that I've never launched on this machine) and left a useable Find in its place. Which we didn't have at all in between 8.6 and 10.2.