Searching for the Perfect OS
It may sound idiotically simple, but according to technology's leading seer, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, searching for information -- not sorting it -- is the wave of the future.
At Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco this week, Jobs declared that searching for information on a hard drive, rather than sorting into files and folders, is the future of computing.
"We all have a million file folders and you can't find anything," Jobs said during his keynote speech introducing Tiger, the next iteration of Mac OS X, due next year.
"It's easier to find something from among a billion Web pages with Google than it is to find something on your hard disk," he added.
The solution, Jobs said, is a system-wide search engine, Spotlight, which can find information across files and applications, whether it be an e-mail message or a copyright notice attached to a movie clip. "We think it's going to revolutionize the way you use your system," Jobs declared.
In Jobs' scheme, the hierarchy of files and folders is a dreary, outdated metaphor inspired by office filing. In today's communications era, categorized by the daily barrage of new e-mails, websites, pictures and movies, who wants to file when you can simply search? What does it matter where a file is stored, as long as you can find it?
Take for example, Rael Dornfest, who has stopped sorting his e-mail. Instead of cataloging e-mail messages into neat mailboxes, Dornfest allows his correspondence to accumulate into one giant, unsorted inbox. Whenever Dornfest, an editor at tech publisher O'Reilly and Associates, needs to find something, he simply searches for it.
Apple is applying the same reasoning not just to e-mail, but to all the files stored on a hard drive. Microsoft also is touting a similar system-wide search engine in Longhorn, the next major version of Windows.
Jobs demonstrated Spotlight by finding a place-name reference in a PDF map, which the system had indexed in the background seconds after it had been downloaded from the Net.
As well as indexing the content of files, Spotlight also parses metadata: information about a file's type, size, date and kind, as well as the author, creation date and dozens of other parameters.
To track information as it comes in, the system will enable users to create smart folders that automatically archive new material corresponding to specified search terms.
Jobs showed Spotlight working in Apple's Mail application; a smart "Paris" folder archived messages with any mention of the French capital, and new messages would be added as they arrive.
"It's very, very simple, and it's a really effective way to find anything ... it automatically finds stuff you'd never find by hand," he said.
David Karger, a Computer Science professor at MIT, said search engines capable of searching the entire contents of a hard drive are long overdue.
"It's about time," he said. "It's not an exciting new idea. It's something that's been needed for a long time.... I do think it's ridiculous it's taken this long."
Karger, the head of MIT's Haystack project, an information management tool with an emphasis on search, noted that users can perform brute-force searches of hard drives, but they are painfully slow. He had no explanation why it has taken Apple and Microsoft so long. "This is one of the mysteries for me," he said. "It's not that hard and so obviously useful."
Karger predicted search will become central to computer interaction, but implementation will be key. "The question is whether it can be done easily enough," he said. "The devil is in the user interface details."
Ken Bereskin, Apple's director of Mac OS X product marketing, said Spotlight has been a couple of years in development -- before Panther -- and incorporates several complex system technologies. Bereskin said the system was inspired by the speedy search engine in iTunes, which instantly returns results as soon as the user starts typing: whether the match is in the song's title, album, genre or artist fields.
"We noticed that people just search all the time," he said. "We asked if that could be applied to everything: contacts, calendar, e-mail and the contents of your hard drive."
"Having powerful, system-wide search capabilities available will definitely change the way people use their computer," said Norbert Heger, co-founder of Objective Development and author of LaunchBar, an information management tool. "This is the No. 1 feedback we receive from our users. However, it won't make (the OS X) Finder redundant. People won't stop categorizing their information. That's marketing speech."
"If it's implemented well, Spotlight may become an extremely interesting technology," Heger said. "It's obvious that with the growing amount of data that's stored on today's computers, it becomes more and more important to have the means to search this plethora of information in an efficient manner."
From wired.com
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At Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco this week, Jobs declared that searching for information on a hard drive, rather than sorting into files and folders, is the future of computing.
"We all have a million file folders and you can't find anything," Jobs said during his keynote speech introducing Tiger, the next iteration of Mac OS X, due next year.
"It's easier to find something from among a billion Web pages with Google than it is to find something on your hard disk," he added.
The solution, Jobs said, is a system-wide search engine, Spotlight, which can find information across files and applications, whether it be an e-mail message or a copyright notice attached to a movie clip. "We think it's going to revolutionize the way you use your system," Jobs declared.
In Jobs' scheme, the hierarchy of files and folders is a dreary, outdated metaphor inspired by office filing. In today's communications era, categorized by the daily barrage of new e-mails, websites, pictures and movies, who wants to file when you can simply search? What does it matter where a file is stored, as long as you can find it?
Take for example, Rael Dornfest, who has stopped sorting his e-mail. Instead of cataloging e-mail messages into neat mailboxes, Dornfest allows his correspondence to accumulate into one giant, unsorted inbox. Whenever Dornfest, an editor at tech publisher O'Reilly and Associates, needs to find something, he simply searches for it.
Apple is applying the same reasoning not just to e-mail, but to all the files stored on a hard drive. Microsoft also is touting a similar system-wide search engine in Longhorn, the next major version of Windows.
Jobs demonstrated Spotlight by finding a place-name reference in a PDF map, which the system had indexed in the background seconds after it had been downloaded from the Net.
As well as indexing the content of files, Spotlight also parses metadata: information about a file's type, size, date and kind, as well as the author, creation date and dozens of other parameters.
To track information as it comes in, the system will enable users to create smart folders that automatically archive new material corresponding to specified search terms.
Jobs showed Spotlight working in Apple's Mail application; a smart "Paris" folder archived messages with any mention of the French capital, and new messages would be added as they arrive.
"It's very, very simple, and it's a really effective way to find anything ... it automatically finds stuff you'd never find by hand," he said.
David Karger, a Computer Science professor at MIT, said search engines capable of searching the entire contents of a hard drive are long overdue.
"It's about time," he said. "It's not an exciting new idea. It's something that's been needed for a long time.... I do think it's ridiculous it's taken this long."
Karger, the head of MIT's Haystack project, an information management tool with an emphasis on search, noted that users can perform brute-force searches of hard drives, but they are painfully slow. He had no explanation why it has taken Apple and Microsoft so long. "This is one of the mysteries for me," he said. "It's not that hard and so obviously useful."
Karger predicted search will become central to computer interaction, but implementation will be key. "The question is whether it can be done easily enough," he said. "The devil is in the user interface details."
Ken Bereskin, Apple's director of Mac OS X product marketing, said Spotlight has been a couple of years in development -- before Panther -- and incorporates several complex system technologies. Bereskin said the system was inspired by the speedy search engine in iTunes, which instantly returns results as soon as the user starts typing: whether the match is in the song's title, album, genre or artist fields.
"We noticed that people just search all the time," he said. "We asked if that could be applied to everything: contacts, calendar, e-mail and the contents of your hard drive."
"Having powerful, system-wide search capabilities available will definitely change the way people use their computer," said Norbert Heger, co-founder of Objective Development and author of LaunchBar, an information management tool. "This is the No. 1 feedback we receive from our users. However, it won't make (the OS X) Finder redundant. People won't stop categorizing their information. That's marketing speech."
"If it's implemented well, Spotlight may become an extremely interesting technology," Heger said. "It's obvious that with the growing amount of data that's stored on today's computers, it becomes more and more important to have the means to search this plethora of information in an efficient manner."
From wired.com
SOLOEnterprises is your one stop shop for computer consulting in Orange County, web site design and web site hosting.
Remember our motto "We Speak YOUR Language"
Computer Service Orange County
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