My wish for Leopard: a better Spotlight
Now that Apple's World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) is about to begin it might be a good time to write down, what I would like for Leopard:
A better Spotlight!
One reason I have written Nifty Box is, that spotlight currently is only search. There is no easy way for a user to add own keywords or tags to a file. All metadata, that spotlight uses, is given by the specific application, which is responsible for the specific file (done by application specific spotlight importers).
On the other hand Tiger not only introduced spotlight but also extended file attributes (xattr). That is great: you can store any metadata you like, for example tags and keywords. But the sad thing is that spotlight in Tiger does not use these metadata!
If spotlight would read xattr metadata, tags and keywords could be used for all kinds of things, like for example "smart folders". And of course I could improve Nifty Box to export all the tags to xattr for direct use in spotlight.
Ah, would that be nice!
posted by Tim Scheffler at
8/04/2006
3 Comments:
why cant you put your tags into spotlights "comments" field for each file? Wouldn't that give you a ton of power outside of just nifty box? What I really want, is a better way to tag all of my files in finder.....
By
Anonymous, At
10/01/2006 5:37 AM
I've been thinking about that too. In fact the first version of Nifty Box (back in February) used the finder comment for storing the tags. I dropped that, because I thought people would not like an application to mix up their finder comments.
And on the other hand I hoped, that Leopard would give a better way to attach "tags" to a file. I still dont know if something like that is coming for Leopard, but I think getting back to the idea of exporting NB tags to the finder comment would be nice, because Tiger users would benefit from that too.
To be honest: I don't think it will make it into V 1.0, but this might be a good feature for 1.1.
By
Tim Scheffler, At
10/01/2006 10:38 PM
I think the more integration you do with OS X the better, and placing the notes in the comments makes sense. But I think the biggest need is for the user to be able to add hierarchy folders under the library section. I think most people still need to organize their data in folders - not just by tags. Similar to mail.app? Once this is implemented I think you have yourself a real winner.
By
Anonymous, At
11/01/2006 10:57 PM
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