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Spotlight Improvements In Leopard

Posted by kdawson on from the following-spot dept.

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is set to feature several new enhancements to Spotlight, Apple's desktop search, and ComputerWorld outlines them. The improvements include searching across multiple networked Macs, parental search snooping, server Spotlight indexing, boolean search, better application launching (sorely needed), and quick-look previews.

7 of 356 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Beagle allready does this! by Constantine+XVI · · Score: 3, Funny

    Dont know what distro you were using, but in Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy), it was as easy as installing anything else.

    sudo apt-get install beagle python-beagle

    Just put the Deskbar app in the panel and enable the beagle plugin in the Deskbar (for Spotlight-style search-from-panel goodness), and everything works.

    --
    "I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
  2. Re:Beagle allready does this! by GaryPatterson · · Score: 2, Funny

    Beagle sounds very nice. Nothing whatsoever to do with Spotlight, and doesn't run on OS X, but still nice.

    So... you're hoping to be modded 'offtopic' I guess.

  3. This just in! by sokoban · · Score: 4, Funny

    New version of program contains features and bug fixes not present in previous version of program.

    --
    09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
  4. Re:No Mention of Vista? by creysoft · · Score: 2, Funny
    Ooh, it's been demoed in Vista for over a year. Spotlight's been a real, working product since the middle of 2005. Is it not enough for you that Vista is guaranteed to be the best selling operating system in the history of world to date? You actually feel the need to complain that its crappy, half finished features aren't being mentioned in the same breath as an article talking about improvements to existing, stable features in another OS entirely?

    In that case, from now on I demand that every article that talks about Vista's features also talk about my currently-in-planning operating system, Creysoft PsychOSis:

    A new patch from Microsoft today gave Windows Vista the ability to connect to, and remotely control Microsoft(TM) Internet Aware Appliances, now you can use your cell phone to make sure you turned off the coffee pot from the airport. In all fairness, ever since a weird dream the other night, the developer of Creysoft PsychOSis has been pondering a feature which would allow PsychOSis to connect to, and remotely control your mom.
    --
    Formerly GNU/Anonymous Coward. This message has been determined to cause cancer in laboratory animals.
  5. Re:hi, i'm being tracked by my parents by slide-rule · · Score: 5, Funny

    Guess that depends on whether you're paying the mortgage for the basement, or just living in it.

  6. Re:Beagle allready does this! by kestasjk · · Score: 2, Funny

    You're not suggesting Apple isn't the single innovative force in the software industry.. are you? We all know "Spaces" could never have been conceived without Jobs' flawless guidance.

    --
    // MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
  7. Re:No Mention of Vista? by Durandal64 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Almost as long as GDI from freaking windows which is the base vector graphics API. Go look it up, please.

    Just because I was talking about GDI+, because it has the anti-aliasing and translucency features added in OSX, does not mean Windows didn't have a freaking vector language prior to that. In fact there is stuff from the original GDI of Windows in the 80s that is STILL not in OSX.
    Mac OS 9 had vector drawing capabilities in the form of QuickDraw. For Christ's sake, I don't understand why you're making such a huge deal out of this. GUI operating systems generally have vector graphics APIs. And OS X doesn't even make use of vectors to draw the UI. Neither does Vista, as far as I know.

    There is a difference between using 3D textures for window composition and actually using functions of the 3D library for accelerating the drawing inside an application and the desktop.
    I realize that, but you're not listening. Quartz Extreme is more than just using 2-D textured polygons for windows. It also enables you to use OpenGL shaders to apply effects to different parts of the UI in an application. QuartzGL (originally Quartz 2D Extreme) puts the entire drawing path on the GPU. And its benefits are free for any application that uses Quartz for drawing, similar to how Vista's acceleration will be free to applications using WPF. But Vista doesn't have the half-way layer that OS X does. In OS X, people with non-DirectX 9-compliant cards still get some degree of 3-D acceleration, as long as their graphics cards support non-power-of-2 textures and basic shaders, that is, basically every GPU that's been shipped in the past 4 years. With Vista, you either support Aero Glass or you don't. That's not to say that Microsoft did something wrong. Their approach was just revolutionary because of Vista's development time, whereas Mac OS X's was evolutionary.

    Vista also has a Vector composer to further speed up Vista and WPF applications, this is why you can remote desktop 4000 miles away to a Vista machine and STILL have 3D accelerated drawing on the remote screen. A Mac doesn't even have 3D accelerated drawing on screen in front of you if you are sitting at the freaking computer itself unless it is an OpenGL application.
    Of course it does. The screen is composited on the GPU. That's 3-D acceleration. Not to the extent that the whole rendering pipeline is 3-D accelerated, but parts of it are. Claiming that Quartz isn't 3-D accelerated is just flat-out wrong.

    Understand the difference?
    About as well as I understand that you're a condescending prick who obviously has some deep-seated hatred for OS X's rendering pipeline.