[Sigia-l] Spotlight, Apples' new access to files.

[Marcel van Mackelenbergh]

The philosophy of providing access to files in Apple's new OS X, called
Tiger, is interesting. As Listera already mentioned, the tool that provides
access is called 'Spotlight'. 

For the first time the wide audience of Apple users will experience that the
structure that provides access to information, is created at search-time,
not at store-time. The concept is that all files are in a soup, structures
are created when users enter strings or sort the search result. Also users
get acquainted with the idea of metadata providing access to information.
Apple even put in a 'thesaurus' that translates MS Windows terms to Apple
terms. I wonder whether it is possible to create and edit thesauri. Users
store their queries into virtual maps. These virtual maps replace the old
folders.

What was most important to me is that Steve Jobs talks for 13 minutes about
Spotlight out of the total presentation of 110 minutes. 
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/wwdc04/ 
It starts at 42 minutes until 55 minutes.
That's more than 10% just talking about providing access to files. It looks
like we are in the right business :-)

I think for Windows, X1 is very similar software compared to Spotlight.

Marcel van Mackelenbergh
+31 73 522 3022
marcelvanmackelenbergh at home.nl  
http://www.marcelvanmackelenbergh.tk