| Tuesday, January 23, 2007 |
15:15 - I Am So Smart! I Am So Smart!
http://googlemac.blogspot.com/2007/01/spotlight-file-system-for-macfuse.html
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That sure didn't take long. It's only been a week since the Google guys came up with MacFUSE, the Mac OS X extension that gives you the flexibility to swap in custom filesystems right in user space, independent of any system-destabilizing kernel hackery beyond the core extension itself.
Anyone who's unsure of just how useful this might be to the casual user hasn't had to wait: John Gruber has pointed to SpotlightFS, a MacFUSE filesystem plugin that implements Spotlight the way we all hoped (and assumed, really) Apple was going to do it in Tiger. Specifically, it makes Smart Folders that are real folders, with Spotlight search criteria and dynamically updated contents—fully functional in every way that regular folders are. So you can now stick a Smart Folder into your Dock, right-click on it, and have the contents pop up in a list, just like we hoped Spotlight would help reinvigorate the concept of the old Pop-Up Folders of Mac OS 9. You can drop to the Terminal and "ls" the folder's dynamically associated files. You can even embed the contents of "real" Smart Folders, which I guess from this point on will have to be renamed S-M-R-T Folders or something. This really does sort of knock Apple's own Hey-a-little-interface-inconsistency-is-a-small-price-to-pay-for-the-joy-of-mds-grinding-away-at-your-disk implementation into a cocked hat.
As I mentioned once before:
... Don't you hate it when some company puts out some amazing new piece of technology (Google Earth, Aperture, Spotlight, etc) that nobody had ever imagined was possible the week before-- and then, days later, the blogs and message boards are full of people complaining about how this great new product is full of gaps in functionality and poorly implemented features? This in a technology that had been completely missing from their lives up until just a few days before?
The sharp-tongued will also take this as an opportunity to point out the value of third-party app development on an otherwise closed platform, as a rebuke to the closed iPhone. After all, if this illustrates anything it's that Apple isn't perfect at implementing even its own ideas properly, and that third-party developers will step up to the challenge if only given the chance. While I agree in principle, and I guess in practice too, there will always be a counterargument that points out that all you'd do here is fragment the market into users with enhanced functionality and users who don't, which rather goes against the demonstrable benefit of being able to move from computer to computer (or phone to phone) and always be sure that the interface will work the same way, that the same apps will be available, and so on. Yeah, it's a spurious argument, but sometimes I play devil's advocate. It's what I do.
In the meantime, this also just goes to show how much fun those geeks at Google will have if given the opportunity. As dispiriting an experience as Google Desktop for Windows must have been—writing what amounts to Spotlight except on a system without Unique File IDs, that can only locate files by path, so if you move them your database indexes suddenly become invalid and Google Desktop becomes useless for tracking down files you might have moved since you last indexed—being able to roam free in an environment like OS X must be like going to Disneyland.
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Brian Tiemann
