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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."
Windows XP keeps your desktop from becoming overly clutterled with icons you haven't used recently, which makes searching your desktop *much* easier. Clearly, they are the TRUE innova[tt]ors here.
And if that's not enough, the second core should drastically improve that little doggie's performance.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
Searching for stuff requires you to have organized it well in the first place.
No it doesn't. The point of searching is to bypass organization or to impose organization on data according to current needs.
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Wasn't Sherlock on 8.5 the first "desktop search" tool? For the Apple/Windows fight, or did it get web intergration with 9? It's been so long ago I forgot.
'man find'
We can currently download Beagle for open source operating systems and desktops, and it's already somewhat usable. It's written in C# and requires Mono, and I think it's one of the killer apps for OSS too. We've also see it ported to Windows so things are getting very interesting here.
:)
So between Spotlight and Longhorn and Google and Beagle, it's not just a 2-way battle
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
"Tiger is nice in that they've put search capability in a lot of places, but there's a lot more (in Longhorn)," Allchin said.
Referring to an OS that is at least 15 months from release in the present tense is plain crazy, especially when comparing its features to those of an OS that will be on store shelves in 10 days. He might as well just say Longhorn will cure cancer and make your breath minty fresh while you use it. No matter what features it has, they're not doing anybody any good at 6PM on April 29th, 2005-- Tiger's will.
Windows 95 brought us far more features than Macintosh 84.
I'm not sure where that's coming from. I can't speak for Longhorn's search features, but Spotlight (in OS X 10.4) will search based on contents, file name, and tons of metadata. You could toss your files onto your hard disk in any random way you want, and it would be equally efficient at searching as if you had organized it in a more human-friendly way.
Ideally, if you can't remember what you called the document, then maybe you can remember a few key words from its contents, the approximate day when you created it, some metadata such as "photo taken at the Mackinaw Bridge" or something like that.
So while this may not be groundbreakingly new, I think that Spotlight really will provide USEFUL features. Based on what I've seen in previews and whatnot, it would be extremely useful to have an always-ready and always-accessible search feature which can handle metadata easily.
This I find interesting too.
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.
The same thing was being said before the release of Panther. The strengths of longhorn were touted and Panther was conceded as being "admittedly out first, but longhorn will be better". Now 18 months later we have Tiger that is 'admittedly out first, but longhorn will be better".
I bet when Apple announce their next OS (let's call it Ocelot) the commentary in the media will again be...
"Ocelot is admittedly out first, but longhorn will be better".
Of course, the world will suck it up and nod their heads, agreeing that this fabled new version of Windows will be better, sometime in the future, while ignoring the last half decade of "admittedly good" OS X versions which ACTUALLY EXIST AND CAN BE USED!
With the exception of GUI design, networking, popup menus, text rendering, web standards, file systems, security, user friendliness, software licensing agreements, programming languages, feature creep/application bloat and general business practices.
Other than those things they're great! :)
"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!
Spotlight is largely an improvement on the ideas he developed with LiveQueries, adding natural language metadata searching to an OS that's pro-actively metadata oriented in the first place.
If anything, everyone else copied BeOS... the real difference is Spotlight is available to the public at the end of the month. With WinFS, who can say? 2007? 2008? 2009?
The open source world can look forward to Spotlight-like functionality once Beagle and inotify mature, the only real drawbacks are that it's currently rather unstable and written in .NET/Mono
This just in! Microsoft downplays competitor's achievement with a promise of better functionality in a vaporware product! Film at 11!
SoupIsGood Food
Nobody puts more features in to MS windows applications than anybody else.
You might be right, but those guys at Gator/Claria sure gave 'em a run for their money.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
I care, because knowing what utilities can and can't do, and how to take advantage of the former and cover up for the latter, is what makes me a "power user".
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In Gaming News.
Duke Nukem Forever will be better than Half Life 2.
Spotlight indexes every file on your system for which there's a scraping agent (I forget the correct term). And companies can create those agents for their own file formats and tag all sorts of metadata about files in addition to the raw text content.
For example, if your word processor supports a structured title page (i.e. if it knows who the author is, what the title is, etc.), and if there's an agent that understands its file format, you could do a spotlight query that searched specifically for any file where the author was "Anonymous Coward".
More importantly, after the initial indexing pass (where applicable), spotlight doesn' index files nightly like Sherlock. Spotlight knows when you've been sleeping, it knows when you're awake, it knows when you change files a bit, and keeps its index up-to-date. :-)
Comparing Spotlight to Sherlock is a lot like comparing an RSS-enhanced version of Google to the old world-wide-web worm.... It's an entirely different animal altogether.
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