Somebody really needs to write a book called “The Joy of Search.” Heck, maybe I’ll do it.
Anyway, what I’m really excited about here is ThinkSecret’s claim that Apple is going to release OS X 10.4 aka Tiger sometime in April. If Tiger lives up to the hype, I’m seriously considering switching at least for a good portion of the work I do.
The number one problem I face day-to-day is organizing the tremendous amount of information I capture and generate. In my current Wintel setup, I’ve got a decent solution using a high-end search application, DTSearch, that gets me a great deal of what I need. I’ve got about 100gb worth of text, RTF, Word, HTML, PDF, MBOX, etc. files that I regularly need to drill down into to find specific bits of information.
TSearch is great, with lots of neat features, but it has obvious limitations. The most obvious is, its an add-on application rather than being part of the OS. Second, it handles text well, but doesn’t do non-text files so well (it won’t, for example, index metadata in .jpg files, though it would be possible to write a plug-in for it that would do so if I was so-inclined).
What I really want is something like Spotlight which looks like it will combine full text indexing of files in combination with the ability to tag files with metadata and then do some really cool searches/application off that (imagine, for example, tagging a variety of files as being about “Project X” and then creating a virtual folder that will automatically collect all files labelled “Project X”. Add boolean operators in there, and things start to get very interesting.
I’m fortunate to have a dual G5 machine in my office, and while I prefer Windows XP just because I’m more familiar with it, there’s not much on one platform you can’t do on the other when it comes to the sort of production work I do (obviously I’d have to keep the PC around for the gaming).
I’m going to do a lot of testing with Tiger and if it lives up to its billing, grab a Mac mini to use initially as a networked box where I can throw all of my archived files for indexing and organizing, and then gradually switch to a Powerbook.
Yes, search is that important to me. And, frankly, at this point I doubt that MS is ever going to deliver WinFS in a form that’s going to do what Spotlight can and/or with the same ease of use.