Spotlight Improvements In Leopard

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.

Comments

Beagle allready does this!

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

From tfa One of the biggest advances in Spotlight is that it will be able to search remote computers.

Beagle has done this for a while.

Also from tfa As powerful as Spotlight is, it actually offers a somewhat limited set of search options. (then detailing the new, 1996 search engine style AND/OR/NOT operators).

Beagle's also ahead here:

Beagle supports a search syntax similar to the major search engines you are probably familiar with. If you see too many results for a query, consider refining your search.

  Required words: By default, Beagle will return results containing all of the words you specify, with the exception of common "stop words" such as "a", "the", and "is".

  Phrases: To search for specific phrases (one word next to another), place the words in quotation marks. For example:

                    "White Album"

  Partial words: Beagle supports partial word searches using asterisks as wildcards. For example, to find words like "black", "blackbird", and "blacksmith":

                    black*

  Excluding words: To exclude a word or phrase from your search, prefix it with minus sign ("-"). For example, to find items with "Beatles" but not the word "George":

                    Beatles -George

  Optional words: To indicate that the word A or word B be in results, use OR, i.e. to find items which contain either "George" or "Ringo" (or both). The OR is case-sensitive.

                    George OR Ringo

  Property queries: By default, Beagle looks for your search terms in the text of the documents and their metadata. If you want to search for a specific property, use the format property:keyword. You can find a list of supported properties by running beagle-query --keywords. Property queries follow all the rules mentioned above; so you can search for properties by phrase, using wildcards, exclude terms, or provide optional terms. For example, the following query will return all of your Beatles MP3s or Ogg/Vorbis files that aren't on the Abbey Road album:

                    artist:Beatles ext:mp3 OR ext:ogg -album:"Abbey Road"

  Searching file extensions: You can use either *.mp3 or ext:mp3 to search for documents by file extension. (In this example, MP3s.)

I guess sometime's Spotlight's ahead on features & at other times Beagle's ahead.

Re:Beagle allready does this!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but with the exception of network search, Spotlight's search query engine has been able to do *all* of those things from the beginning, the difference is that this is now supported in the blue menu at the top of the menu bar (not jsut from the command line or code). You can perform incredibly complicated queries in Spotlight that you simply cannot do in Beagle.

Why? Because Beagle uses the Lucene search engine. Speaking as someone who uses Lucene every day, has written numerous analysers, query parsers and filters, it doesn't come close to Spotlight's engine. Examples? Queries can't start with a wild card, queries cannot comprise of a NOT clause by itself, results are stored in an immutable data structure that does not support merging, queries containing wild cards and ranges of values get translated into an enormous query with an OR clause for *every term in the index*. Thats fucking disgraceful. Lucene is also *much* slower then Spotlight, and contains numerous memory leaks relating to index readers and writers.

Lucene is exceptionally easy to use and develop for, and Beagle ain't half bad, but Spotlight is superior in every way (except being closed source, yawn).

Re:Beagle allready does this!

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

These claims that Linux features are creeping into OS X is bogus;

Sensible people realise that all the major Operating Systems copy both from each other and (more commonly) research Operating Systems.

People who see feature X is linux, then see it in OS X & Windows may incorrectly come to the conclusion that OS X & Windows are copying linux.

It's far more likely however that all three operating systems copied feature X from $weird_academic_researh_OS.

Re:Beagle allready does this!

[Anonymous Coward]

apt-get isn't the recommended way to install applications in Ubuntu. Synaptic, a nice GUI front end to parts of the apt suite, is. No need to type anything except for an administrator password.

Re:Beagle allready does this!

[steeviant]

The first "live query" desktop search that made it beyond proof-of-concept was in BeOS, made possible by a ground-up rewrite of the file system which blessed BeOS with (in the words of BeOS's lead file system engineer) "database-like" features, though I can't remember exactly which version of BeOS BFS first appeared in.

Google Desktop Search, MSN Desktop Search, Beagle, Tracker (no, not the BeOS file manager), Apple's Spotlight, the Start menu search box in Vista and to a large extent Microsoft's never-ready WinFS next generation file system all borrow extensively from BeOS's original implementation.

Not entirely coincidentally, the principal developer of BFS Dominic Giampaolo now works for Apple as a file system engineer.

Re:Beagle allready does this!

[asdfgl]

Now, it is a bit unfair to rebut the parent poster by saying that a feature is in an unreleased development trunk.

Re:Beagle allready does this!

[LKM]

The thing to keep in mind here is that for most users of Mac OS X (and Apple customers in general), "more features" does not equal "better" - see also: iPhone, iPod.

If you're one of those people who like tons of features, being able to replace system-level functions, tons of settings (possibly in arcane text files), the Mac may not be the best OS for you.

Apple's claim to fame is not "we have the most features," it's "we have the features you need, and we make them usable."

Spotlight, Windows Search, here's an idea...

[Aphrika]

...it'd be great if they also indexed your offline media too?

The number of times I have to swap out CDs trying to find an image file or an old piece of code - it drives me nuts! Now with DVD it gets worse, HD-DVD, Blu-ray - forget it, that's a needle in a haystack. How difficult could it be to have the drive index offline media too - a bit like some tape library software or the like? Maybe it could index when you burn? The last time I saw something like this was when I got a Zip drive back in 1997 and some nifty free software came with it. Now, it seems that you can only search your local drive - a bad idea when removable media is the norm.

So, at the risk of sounding like a total banana; why doesn't anyone do this, or am I missing some glaringly obvious checkbox somewhere in OS X/XP/Fedora/Vista?

Re:Spotlight in Finder windows

[Blakey Rat]

Yes, this:

Finder sucks ass.

That's pretty much all there is to it to answer your question. Most things on OS X are great, but Finder is a huge, festering piece of crap that doesn't handle network drives worth crap, doesn't handle large folders worth crap, and doesn't have as many features as Finder in OS 9 did. And 5 releases later, Apple still hasn't fixed it.

It's infuriating.

This just in!

[sokoban]

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

Aliases are a lot better than a symlink

[Space cowboy]

example:

  prompt% ln -s /tmp/already.exists /path/to/symlink
  prompt% mv /tmp/already.exists /tmp/this.is.a.new.name

The symlink is now screwed. An alias set up to point at /tmp/already.exists would work just fine and peachy when the file was renamed (or moved elsewhere on the disk) as above.

Simon.

Re:hi, i'm being tracked by my parents

[slide-rule]

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

Re:No Mention of Vista?

[Durandal64]

OSX only has a bitmap composer that does nothing more than use the GPU textures for double buffering, it is NOT 3D accelerated, nor even 3D rendered. (Vista is BOTH.)

The compositor uses the GPU, which is 3-D acceleration. And QuartzGL, the fully 3-D rendering pipeline, was in Tiger in development form.

OSX's vector based graphics API is EQUIVALENT to GDI+ that has been available in Windows since 2001. Go look this up, please. Additionally, the Vectoring API of OSX is NOT EVEN close to the WPF vectoring concepts in Vista, from animation constructs to true 3D rendering and hit checking and is TRULY 3D accelerated.

OS X's vector graphics API? You mean NSBezierPath? That's been around since NeXTStep, which far predates Windows XP.

BS

[westyvw]

How in the hell you got modded insightful is beyond me.
Look, for windows:
1. Search the internet for a program that does what you want.
2. Read some reviews and see if its a legit program, and not some crappy ad-ware/botware.
3. do you want to pay for this program? A decision must by made here.
4. Download the program
5. Run spyware and antivirus software on it
6. Click install.exe
7. accept EULA
8. Choose if you are installing this for all users or your self
8. hope and pray that it doesn't affect other programs or change extensions
9. Use it, and if you dont like it:
9b. uninstall it and hope and pray you dont have to clean up after it.

However with Linux, if you know the package you want you could do a command line apt-get install foo
OR
You can open your package manager (synaptic in my case) and do a search for "search" and read the desriptions of the package, such as beagle, and click on it to install. DONE. Removal is just as easy.

Thats why windows is a pain in the ass, and Linux is just easy.
So dont spread FUD. The average linux user gets used to speeding things up, and learns a few shortcuts, like the command line if they are so inclined.

Artie Strikes Again!

[LKM]

Apple fanboys like to think Apple invented everything good about technology.

No, actually. Apple "fanboys" don't think that. You must be thinking of one specific Apple fanboy, Artie MacStrawman.