“With search technology in the spotlight, Apple Computer is making better ways to find desktop files the cornerstone of its next version
of the Mac OS X operating system.” Read the Article at C|Net.
C|Net Summarizes Tiger’s Spotlight
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Do you know who owns C|Net?
They are owned by Ziff Davis, publishers of PC Magazine and ZDNet.
Who is own by one of the orginal founders and ceo of Microsoft.
As a developer, I’m pretty impressed that anyone can write a plugin for Spotlight for whatever file format they want, if it’s not covered by the default set.
Of course, it makes good business sense for Apple and big application vendors to support that, but it’s pretty cool for the independent developer, too.
what is the point of this thread? it is obvious that none of you read the article because the article is actually laudatory of Spotlight.
The thing I worry about is this removing the security-by-obsurity of self-created byzantine folder structures. Say I leave my desk to go to the bathroom. Any old Joe could pop in, search for “Financial” and copy down a juciy tidbit that shows up. Then dash away, all before I’ve started unzipping my fly.
A similar problem could occur in the home with wives or husbands or children finding pictures of a certain type, from an idle search word.
I suppose one could add keywords in code, and for text stuff remove obvious words like “money,” but that kind of effort seems like it’d more work to maintain then a static, obscure folder structure.
Axord:
You could also log out of your account, switch to the log in screen, or use a screen saver w/ password to prevent access to the machine. You can also place critical information in a password protected disk image.
Does anyone know a solution like this for Linux is being worked on?
Beagle and Dashboard, currently in gnome cvs, still fairly early development but already usable.
http://www.gnome.org/projects/beagle/
‘removing the security-by-obsurity’ . So, the status-quo of computer interface is so bad, the entire desktop metaphor is so flawed 25 years later people actually rely information obscurity as security? this is extremely dangerous. actually desktop google really reveals this well. this will be especially apparent when desktop google for OSX comes out. so “security”, and i use that term loosely, by obscurity won’t work anymore with the advancement of computer science when it comes to search.
as i understand it the author of the BFS filesystem and book now works for apple and developped this. i read that the BFS was itself a hack as a true DBFS would’ve been too slow (as in perf.)/hard to implement. I wonder if this (spotlight, apple dbish FS) is itself more of a cheap hack than BFS? I get the impression that only the BEOS itself and now maybe HAIKU implement all those neat BEOS features PROPERLY from the ground up, while all others (i think all BE on GNU/LINUX projects are extremely flawed) are just total hacks. I wonder if this apple solution is proper or a hack? BeOS live file querys and DBish FS features were extremely powerful in 1995 when I last used it and to this day I havn’t seen a system as powerful and flexible, modern i would say, unless I’m watching ST:TNG.
Granted, it can be confusing, due to a bunch of spinoffs and business deals. But here’s the right info.
Ziff-Davis is a publishing company that began with print only. CNet was founded as Web-only publishing, many years after Ziff-Davis. Ziff-Davis eventually founded ZDNet, which was a convoluted Web operation; like many ventures of the time, they couldn’t decide how to put content online w/o cannibalizing print sales.
Eventually, Ziff-Davis started ZDTV, a cable TV channel connected to ZDNet. Then ZDTV was separated out, while still being in the same offices. ZDTV was sold, becoming TechTV. No connection then to Ziff-Davis or ZDNet.
A few years ago, Ziff-Davis sold ZDNet to CNet. For no good reason, as far as I can tell; CNet probably just wanted to buy out any competition.
What made this a little complicated is not only that ZDNet was still called ZDNet while being owned by CNet, but also that ZDNet had some rights to republish the print conent of some Ziff-Davis print magazines. That’s done now, and eWeek.com and such are all handled by Ziff-Davis.
So, CNet owns ZDNet. Neither are owned by Ziff-Davis, and CNet does not own Ziff-Davis.
This seems really cool. Seems like we’re moving away from organization through folders, and towards orginization through context. Kind of like a personal database.
umm, I have a feeling you have no clue what you are talking about.
even Eugenia has said on here that Spotlight goes beyond what BFS did. I mean do you really expect Apple to make a piece of software that does a crap job at something? not to mention, do you think that the author of BFS would even want to put his name on something that was not at least as good as BFS?
Apple’s software unit is not driven by the marketing department like at MS.
Plus GNOME Storage and Medusa