The latest Mac OS X Tiger build 8A378 is now available to the testers.
Mac OS X Tiger build 8A378 Hits the Testers
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I remember [sarcasm] immortal words [/sarcasm] of certain someone (if I remember correctly it was Beagle article). Spotlight is here now, and it works
Spotlight infinitely indexing after editing data in your Address Book.
Developers don’t seem to be very happy with the current Spotlight development status, they find that the initial indexing is way too long, it may take a few days to index a large amount of data, no matter how fast your Mac is. The indexing is taking a lot of system ressources as well and makes the whole configuration quite slow.
It sounds like they have a few bugs to fix. Apple is releasing tiger builds more frequently which usually means that they are getting close to a release date.
Your sarcasm about Spotlight deserves a response: According to Microsoft, “Windows Longhorn will be shipped in 2003. It will have many new important features including a database driven filing system.” Is it possible that a billion dollar company missed a ship date? In addition, I understand that this feature may not be available in 2006 Longhorn release (along with several other notable features).
Apple has done an impressive job of delivering new and innovative system software. I think I will wait for the Tiger release before passing judgment.
I mean seriously what is the use of Spotlight for a regular home user? I do not use the Windows Indexing service ever. I am going to buy a dual mac all specced out top of the line as soon as they hit 3.5 ghz and larger hard drive capacities and by then the first update to Tiger would probably be out on the market! I hope that there is a way to cmpletely get rid of Spotlight. I am never gonna need to use it and I think neither would a lot of Mac customers. I think this is just more kludge being added to the beautiful OS. On the other hand CoreImage and CoreAudio, I believe those are the 2 technologies that I am most anxious to try out on a high end Mac system!! Whoo!! Exciting times!
I also wonder what I’ll use Spotlight for. I keep my stuff reasonably organised, so if I want something I can follow a logical path to where it is.
But then I know lots of people who don’t believe in subfolders, and just stick everything in their Documents folder. They’ll love Spotlight.
I don’t think it’s a kludge though, even if it’s not something I need. The Finder needs the ability to find files. It’s just that fundamental. Spotlight, with the ability to search inside documents (even PDFs) could be very useful.
Maybe I can use it… Sometimes I need to search through thousands of documents for an example of how to use a certain API function. Spotlight could help me a lot there. Hmmm…
Go watch the spotlight quicktime demo at Apple. I am a home user and I think it is cool and I would use it.
In my opinion, Spotlight will be like a “Goggle” of your system only more powerful. It will automatically index everything on your hard drive(s) creating a meta-data index entry that the system will maintain and update as necessary. Discovery will be easy using Spotlight’s intuitive interactive search pane (see Steve Jobs last keynote speech). I think that Spotlight will be one of those things you didn’t know you needed, but after using it for a while, you’ll wonder how you lived without it.
The old Sherlock (System 9 days) did have some features like Spotlight, but in a more limited fashion (it was an option to turn on/off indexing).
While it’s true that not everyone will find Spotlight useful, people that use their computer for research, business, science and programming will love Spotlight.
smart folders, thats what spotlight is going to be useful for
OMFG! A beta release has some bugs in it. The world is coming to an end as we know it.
I believe spotlight is wonderful! Why navigate folders if I can do a quick search and find everthing I need? For those QuickSilver users, it is almost a 100% replacement.
I am eagerly awaiting Spotlight and think it is really going to be a great addition to Mac OS X. I have a lot of PDFs on my system and I got tired of having to organize and categorize these properly so I could find them better. After awhile, I just stopped caring.
Spotlight will be great because I can just do a quick search for the type of stuff I am looking for. Sure I can do that now, but I can create smart folders to save my searches for me and it will do everything a lot faster.
But my one concern I keep hearing is the indexing time. I don’t know that much about the process of indexing files on a hard drive, but how is Microsoft and Google’s Desktop search able to index a user’s system faster than Spotlight. I know that after the initial indexing, Spotlight indexing is done on the fly and the user won’t really know it, but the initial indexing is still pretty long.
OMG OMG OMG, the cat will be let out of the bag soon. I can’t wait for tiger, I hope it runs well on my g3 600. I doubt their will be any great speed improvements to g3 hardware, I feel for the g5 it will be noticeable.
hmm.. what do you do with a document that fits in 5 different categories? make physical copies? make aliases?
that is a lot of work. how about just creating the categories using smart folders!!!… wow, that was hard…
next I want to see a play list type folder that allows you to drop a file in it but the file is not really there..e then you can manually collect info into many different categories logically.
a little bit of brainpower is required i think to organize stuff. thats how i do mine and i have yet to depend on the search feature. the only time i have used search is to find some random dll file needed for like an opengl wrapper and i was curious to see if i had it!! thats all. the files i put in my machine are organized and i can access them in 5 seconds. i think spotlight will be more of a novelty tool. my 2 cents.
Maybe you don’t have that much stuff in your box…
I’ve got on the external firewire hd -which is connected to my emac – almost 1,7GB only docs…
I mean seriously what is the use of Spotlight for a regular home user? I do not use the Windows Indexing service ever. I am going to buy a dual mac all specced out top of the line as soon as they hit 3.5 ghz and larger hard drive capacities and by then the first update to Tiger would probably be out on the market! I hope that there is a way to cmpletely get rid of Spotlight. I am never gonna need to use it and I think neither would a lot of Mac customers. I think this is just more kludge being added to the beautiful OS. On the other hand CoreImage and CoreAudio, I believe those are the 2 technologies that I am most anxious to try out on a high end Mac system!! Whoo!! Exciting times!
You should consider sticking with Windows. Apple has nothing to offer you that Longhorn won’t, when it gets released… sometime this century.
You will not get rid of Spotlight, it is part of your system. Spotlight is going to be a fantastic boon for the system and I know I will be using it all the time. I’m already using Finder in much the same way.
Of course it’s no good if your initial index time is numbered in days. That’s why they call it a beta.
I hope it takes another few years before they hit the 3.5 G mark. That will at least save me that much longer from people who don’t like the color of the widgets in Dashboard or the fact that Spotlight will be a circle instead of a square and those who are not Mac drivers now but nevertheless tell me how I’m going to use my system when Tiger comes out.
Spotlight when it is implemented correctly, will allow the user to find files quickly and easily, which is a serious improvement over the dog sniffing its butt in the search functionality in Windows [which you can enjoy to your heart’s content btw, make it do tricks, you’ll love it!]. Of course you know every and all obscure reference in every file you ever made 4 years ago, but I tend to be a little blurry about that, must be old age. But if I know for certain that a keyword was in that document, and it contains information that I need, Spotlight will find it for me [and quickly too, it is devoutly hoped].
H.264 looks like a great improvement for video quality in any size. Stuff is going to look SO cool on it.
Your dual x.xx Gig is going to take 16 Megs of Ram at least. And you’re going to spec that out? Start your rant on the cost of RAM now so you don’t have to do it when you buy the box. But of course you’re going to have a North-Korean PoW hammer out some RAM chips from old artillery shell casings so it’s only going to cost you 2 dimes per Gig, right?
Go to Apple’s site and max out the dual 2.5 Gig. Then come back to foam at the mouth over what it costs. You can buy a car for that money
.
My theory is very simple – if it works, it will be used. Those three magic words “if it works” holds such requirements:
* very fast indexing
* very fast finding
* elegant and useful (not only UF) interface
etc.
If Spotlight will pull all these requirements (I’m sure that Apple can handle interface), then it will become a killer feature of OS X Tiger.
‘Office’ Files, folders, music, applications, and others will be seen…but in my mind photos are where this would benefit the home user. I don’t put any information into my image’s meta or in iPhoto so they will tend to get missed by spotlight. Each file has a very nice name like DCSNxxxxx.jpg
In general, garbage in, garbage out.
I was underwhelmed by the descriptions of Spotlight, and then I got a chance to try it. If you use grep on a regular basis, you will like Spotlight. As Apple continues to merge GUI world with command-line world, Spotlight is like grep for the GUI. In many ways it’s better than grep. It’s more convenient (bound to a hotkey), faster (because everything is preindexed), and more pervasive (searches the whole computer and not limited to just text files).
And for less sophisticated users who don’t keep a tidy filesystem, Spotlight will be a godsend.
I haven’t had a chance to try Beagle yet so I can’t compare, but a big plus for Spotlight is its tight integration with the filesystem.
If it works like beagle, it’ll be neat. Beagle’s early in development, slowish and doesn’t do everything it eventually will yet, and I still find myself using it more than I expected to. No matter how organised your filesystem, a single tool that searches files, their metadata and contents, mail messages and IM logs is *damn* useful, and AFAIK spotlight is going to do all of this for OS X users.
(oh, and obligatory cheap shot – sure, beagle isn’t finished yet, but it _does_ manage to finish its initial indexing in less than a couple of days. ;>)
H.264 won’t give you any better video quality than DivX, xvid or any other MPEG-4 based codec does at the moment.
doesn’t give any better video quality than VC-1 (Windows Media Video 9.0) and that has been around for about 2 years now.
I know, I know … open standards etc. But people demanded a better codec in quality and DRM support and Microsoft delivered.
>H.264 won’t give you any better video quality than DivX,
>xvid or any other MPEG-4 based codec does at the moment.
Where did you get that from?
It will certainly give you better quality than other MPEG-4 codecs do at the moment.
I think that it will also deliver better quality than VC-1, because VC-1 doesn’t deliver much better quality than current MPEG-4 codecs like DivX, but I cannot say this for sure because I’ve never worked with Microsoft’s codecs.
I don’t put any information into my image’s meta or in iPhoto so they will tend to get missed by spotlight. Each file has a very nice name like DCSNxxxxx.jpg
Sounds as if imgSeek might be the tool for you:
http://imgseek.sourceforge.net/
greetings,
danB
one thing i’m curious to know is if i could use spotlight across network share points.. we’ve got a good 8TB of photos here chock full of metadata.. if thats possible, then its going to be an incredible time saver here.. it does seem unlikely, but apple suprises me sometimes
“I don’t put any information into my image’s meta or in iPhoto so they will tend to get missed by spotlight. Each file has a very nice name like DCSNxxxxx.jpg ”
Can’t really say I’m very impressed with this argument. Of course you’re right: if you don’t give the system data, it can’t find your pictures.
But the point is this: if you knew that your pictures would be found by the system, quickly and efficiently, without needing more input from you than putting some keywords in a picture, and you had a boatload of pictures, wouldn’t it be worth your while to add the data to the picture so you could find it back easily?
If you like champagne, are you going to pour it into your sneakers and then complain it tastes like ass?
You complain like a lot of the people I get to have nice conversations with every day: knowing that software operates within certain tolerances, they insist on
1. not learning what the software can do
2. not learning how to use it properly
3. using the software for purposes it was manifestly not designed for
4. complain to me that it doesn’t work and they want their money back
would you drive your car until you ran out of gas and, stuck in the middle of nowhere, would you complain that you have to keep putting gas in the tank or the damn thing will just quit on you?
Don’t try to defeat your system, find out what it can do for you and use it within those parameters. I can’t believe you would want to gripe about not being able to find files when you knew that you could find them if you had just used your system the way it is supposed to be used.
“sir, to operate your vehicle, just put your key in the ignition, and turn it to start the engine”
“I don’t wanna”
“yes, well…”