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

[Listera]

Marcel van Mackelenbergh:

You mentioned two very important aspects of Spotlight that often get
overlooked:

> I wonder whether it is possible to create and edit thesauri.

Unlike the current version of Google Desktop search, Apple provides a whole
API structure to allow third parties to plug their own software into
Spotlight. So that if your application has some strange data structure you
can still write a translator/importer that plugs into Spotlight *and* since
Spotlight is available system-wide and as a framework you can search for
your special data from *inside* any other app. In other words, data (even
data with uncommon structure) becomes fungible across/within apps. My custom
visualization app, for example, can have on its own Spotlight searchbox and
display *and* interact with data from, say, some weird satellite tracking
custom app, if that developer makes a translator available for Spotlight.

Apple - Mac OS X - Tiger Preview - Spotlight Technologies
<http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/spotlighttech.html>

> Users store their queries into virtual maps. These virtual maps replace the
> old folders.

Apple, of course, has had more than a decade of experience with the notion
of not-necessarily-structured data "soup" which was at the heart of Newton
OS. 

Ziya
Nullius in Verba