Cornered! is a blog devoted, most of the time anyway, to telecommunications: local and global issues, technology, people and trends from the perspective of someone who's been reporting, analysing and commenting on the industry since the dark ages (BC - before competition). Sometimes serious, sometimes flippant, sometimes frivolous. Controversial, analytical, informative, amusing, but never boring; a vehicle for examinations of important issues and observations on my encounters and experiences in an industry where polarised views and hyperbole are the norm.
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Cornered! Leopard's Spotlight: a better way to search
Cornered! Leopard's Spotlight: a better way to search | Leopard's Spotlight: a better way to search |
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| by Stuart Corner | |
| Tuesday, 08 August 2006 | |
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Lack of Boolean search was an obvious shortcoming of Tiger's Spotlight and that will be redressed in Leopard. It will support Boolean operators 'AND', 'OR' and 'NOT'. It will also support search using specific file attributes — author, type, or keyword, for example. However more significant is the addition of network search. Spotlight under Leopard will search across network-mounted folders on other Macs that are accessible using OS X's file sharing. A further logical extension of Spotlight would be to make it not an adjunct to accessing files on a Mac or a network of Macs, but the primary means: following the philosophy behind Google's OneBox : its search technology embedded in hardware and designed for installation in an enterprise to access information across the corporate data systems. One advantage touted for the Google OneBox is that easily enables disparate file types relevant to the task in hand - applications, database records, documents etc - to be easily located. You can already see this approach manifest in another Leopard feature, Spaces: a means of grouping together multiple application windows used for particular project or type of projects. As Apple describes it: "You can drag all your application windows onto different Spaces. Keep all your work projects in one Space and that fun flick you made in iMovie in another. Create a communication Space for iChat and Mail. Organise your Spaces however you want just by dragging windows into them." Assigning an 'space' attribute to a file and making this Spotlight-searchable seems like a logical next step. Leopard's Spotlight will also introduce another useful feature, Quick Look, "a new way to preview a document, picture, or slideshow in a single click, without opening an application." You'll be able to select a search result and Quick Look will display the result — an iPhoto snapshot, a PDF, an Address Book contact — in a graphic overlay. It will even play QuickTime movies. However for users such as myself who maintain and frequently need to access and use information from a large text file archive Spotlight still falls short of the long time standard: RetrieveIt!, conceived in the early nineties and regrettably never ported to OS X. It's particularly useful because: it supports searching on proximity - "Apple" within x characters of "Macintosh" - for example; and one click on a 'hit' in a text, or Word file opens it in RetrieveIt allowing instant cut and paste of the found reference and surrounding text. From the preview it does not look as if Spotlight under Leopard will do either of those things. Maybe they will come with 'Lion'. {moscomment}
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