The future of Spotlight and OS X

[slb]

If anyone didn't see this on OSNews, here it is: http://www.kottke.org/05/04/future-spotlight

It has quotes from an alleged Apple employee who posts on Slashdot. Even if he's not legit, the ideas are very interesting, and I wouldn't be surprised to see them implemented by the time Windows Longwait comes out!

 

[Lacero]

I love the idea of relational data. Whereby taking two dissimilar pieces of information and linking them in a way that makes sense to humans, but may be lost to a computer.

This is similar to the work on the "semantic" web where searching for a word may bring up results that may not have the word in the content, but the website it may be referring to the word in question.

 

[mkrishnan]

However its implemented I think the whole focus in the article on new and effective ways to create metadata is really important. There need to be easy ways to make documents, esp things like pics that have little text associated with them, have meaning to the search engine....

It'd be interesting if future versions of Spotlight had a sort of six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon mode, where as an alternative to showing you ranked finds in different categories, it portrayed them graphically, as a web of interconnections. How cool would that be? Probably tough to use, though, so that, like Exposé, a lot of people would just use it to impress Windows users. (Not that Exposé is all that hard to use!)

 

[brianjking]

There is a few things in the Spotlight technology that I really can't live without. The one that is the most important I would have to say would be...MS Entourage email indexing. I know, I know...use Mail. Unfortunately with the amassed email in my box & the number of accounts I have importing would just be absolutely nuts. Also, Entourage is one of the few apps other then MS Visio that's worth using to begin with.

The entire concept and structure behind Spotlight is incredible. The ability to have a semantic style of sorting data that is fast, effective, & secure is absolutely incredible.

 

[Freakk123]

I think there is limitless potential for spotlight, and Apple just needs to keep working on ways to make it better. For instance, it should keep track of the urls of all the websites you have visited, something that launchbar (the third party app) does.

It would also be nice if it supported more third party applications, but there are a lot of plug-ins, and more are being released. I don't use entourage myself, but I know that many people do, so that would definately be one to add.

The voice recognition and gps ideas mentioned in the article (?) would be really impressive, but I can't see either happening for some time. But who knows?