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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."
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.
"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
Of course, those that have followed Microsoft's career know that their basic strategy is always promising, if not guaranteeing, that the next version of their applications will be perfect. Amazingly, some users still believe this hogwash.
The fact is, I salute Microsoft for going this route.
I've evaluated plenty of SQL filesystems, attempted to implement my own, and with mild success, ran and tested many implementations. Here's what I found out:
SQL sucks as a filesystem. While it's great that SQL can store relations incredibly well, make finding files easier, and provide a good, intellegent backup system, its faults are with the implementation, every time.
It requires the programmer to make two choices; "Do I want to include an entire SQL engine in kernel space, or leave it in user space?" and "Do I want the 'parsing agent' to run in user space or in kernel space?".
To anyone who's ever worked with an SQL engine, the answer to the first question is obvious. If you move the entire SQL engine to kernel space, you're introducing kernel bloat in the size of 40-80 megabytes for the software itself (including caches, sql tables in ram, etc). But if you leave it in userspace, every user has to have their own copy of the software running for them, or your parser agent has to have a kernel hook that basically takes the input from the user accessing the file system, and redirect it to the SQL engine itself.
The "Parsing Agent" as it were, is a piece of code that actually rips apart the files you send to it, grabbing the content's type, and any metadata it can filter out of the file. It can then use two seperate transfers to send the file to one table, and the metadata to another. When searching for a file, it simply queries the metadata, and matches a file index to the files located in the data cache. This is how almost all modern desktop search technologies work (Google Desktop Search, Spotlight, and whatever Windows Longhorn will have).
The existance of a good parsing agent makes an SQL file system virtually irrelevant. I commend them for not wasting their time storing the whole files in an SQL database, but the metadata should be. That way, using a common API, all programs should be able to quickly find files they need to operate, making the file system more amorphous, and less rigid. Hell, if software engineers cared enough, we could get rid of the whole idea of a heirarchial file system now; simply tag incoming files with a UID, and write them to disk, making the "Parsing Agent" keep all of the metadata, and letting it deal with finding and opening files. You could have links on your desktop to commonly used searches "All files Containing the word 'Lyrics'" (a common one used during my tests).
Really, I'd love to see what Apple has in store for Spotlight, but I definitely know that Windows Longhorn is better off without WinFS the way they originally planned it.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush