Tigers Spotlight addition
So after doing some more talking with Tim and reading over various articles from developers who attended the Spotlight session at Apples World Wide Developer Conference I take back some of my uninformed comments below. It seems Apple has managed to put Spotlight ontop of the current HFS+ filesystem. Or better expanding it with an database of metainfo. There are three different things that gets searched when you put in a search query in the shiny flashy UserInterface. First is the the current file catalog type and creator search, then there is the newly engineered metadata database that gets an update for an individual file when this file is moved copied or saved (and it seems its doing the indexing extremely fast). And furthermore there is the fulltext search (SearchKit) which is said to be much speedier then the current fulltext indexing and also is started every time a file is modified. The last two need plugins for each filetype (to read ID3 tags for example), developer are encouraged to roll their own with deep down cocoa and shallower carbon apis.
All in all it sounds like a great deal. It might be the first step into an unordered system where you do not need to make folders or have 255 character filenames to recognize your valuable data. Just make a smart folder that lists all files for a current project and wooosh you can save randomly onto your harddrives where ever you feel like and still see all the files in one place. Of course that would mean that the Application do a good job of categorizing the files (put some info in the metadata). Canīt wait.