There are quite a few Mac fans around the office. There was even a white board where people put up their guess as to what the big announcement from Apple was going to be about on Tuesday. Nano? Love it. Rokr phone? Nah. The designer geeks were all over the cosmetic changes to iTunes which are best expressed in this hilarious exchange between “Brushed Metal” and his agent on Daring Fireball.
Tag: Apple
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More details on Apple’s Spotlight
A technical document recently posted on Apple’s developer site details Spotlight, the new desktop search technology due in the next release of the Mac OS.
But more than a collection of individual technologies that work
together, Spotlight gives you the ability to plug your application into the operating system and work with files in a totally new way. For example, if you were building an asset management application you could use Spotlight to find all of the files that match certain criteria rather than trying to slog through the file system yourself. Or, if your application specialized in supporting various kinds of workflows, you could use Spotlight to find all of the files that needed to be marked with a particular keyword. Once you get used to working with files in this new way, you’ll never want to go back. -
Search, not Sort
Wired files this story on Apple’s announcement of Spotlight.
In Jobs’ scheme, the hierarchy of files and folders is a dreary, outdated metaphor inspired by office filing. In today’s communications era, categorized by the daily barrage of new e-mails, websites, pictures and movies, who wants to file when you can simply search? What does it matter where a file is stored, as long as you can find it?
Microsoft is already doing this with something called “Search Folders” on Outlook 2003, Apple is extending that paradigm to the entire hard drive and indexing in the background to improve performance.
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Spotlight Developer’s Kit
Just dug around a bit and see that Apple will be providing a Developer’s Kit to extend Spotlight’s search engine to other applications.
But the search engine also works contextually within applications such as Apple’s Mail, Address Book and System Preferences—and Apple is giving developers at WWDC a software development kit to help them build Spotlight into their own applications.
eWeek, June 28thI guess they’re going to reach out to their developer’s community to connect Spotlight to the internet. This should be interesting.
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Wall Street Journal picks up scent
Front Page of yesterday’s Marketplace section has two stories, side-by-side, picking up on the meme of universal search with a graphic of two bloodhounds trying to get their way into a PC. One covers the announcement of the beta MSN search interface announced yesterday and the second looks at Apple’s Spotlight utility for desktop search. Both articles pose the theory that each of these companies are edging into the search space as a key differentiators. Microsoft’s approach is to create a better portal to the internet and Apple is working on getting an integrated desktop search out the door ahead of Microsoft’s Longhorn launch which promises better desktop searching.
If Microsoft is launching a better internet search engine to couple to their improved desktop search tools launching with Longhorn, and Apple is bundling better desktop search with Spotlight, the only thing missing is Apple integrated with an internet search engine. Apple’s Safari browser already integrates Google without the need of a separate toolbar – wonder what will happen to Sherlock which was Apple’s first attempt to embed internet searching into the desktop? Will Apple build its own, partner with a partner like Google, or reach out to the developer community to add on to Spotlight internet search integration?
Not exactly an admission, the article about Spotlight digs in to ask if either Google or Yahoo are looking at getting into the desktop search business themselves,
Google, which has become synonymous with finding information on the Internet, is working on its own tool for searching a PC, according to people who have talked with the company. A Google spokesman declined to comment on any product plans. Analysts say Yahoo may also get into desktop search. “If we think that’s something we need to do, we’ll look at it,” a Yahoo spokeswoman says.
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Spotlight
Apple announced the next version of their OS, codenamed “Tiger” which has an improved local search feature called “Spotlight” with the marketing tagline of, “Find anything, anywhere. Fast” Although it is limited to an index of local files and does not extend searches to the internet, it promises an improved index of local files and their metadata that builds dynamically in the background so that it is constantly updated. Spotlight is being released with a documented API so one can assume that Apple will leverage its developer community. It’s only a matter of time before someone publishes extensions to open web search engines.