Outliners and Spotlight

Posted by Randall Shinn
Apr 13, 2008 at 02:01 PM

One of the great surprises of switching to OS X Leopard has been the usefulness of Spotlight, the operating system’s built-in indexing and search utility. It works so well and quickly at finding and launching applications and documents that I couldn’t see any reason to install either QuickSilver or LaunchBar, two excellent keyboard utilities.

There are many PIMs being created for OS X, so discussion of them is a hot topic in the Mac world. One point of discussion is whether or not the documents that show up in the viewing pane are best contained in a proprietary format or a standard one such as rtf or pdf. The latter approach ensures future portability, and it also means that Spotlight can locate the documents virtually instantaneously.

A good example of software like this is EagleFiler, which is where I’ve moved almost everything that I used to store in programs like MyInfo, UltraRecall, and Zoot. In EagleFiler files are stored in directories and subdirectories in their native formats. What EagleFiler provides are ways of organizing those files: such as an indexed, hierarchical overview of the files in a folder (“library”), searches, and smart folders that find all files that match specified criteria.

You can have as many libraries as you like in order to divide your files up into groupings that you prefer. The difference that Spotlight makes is that it can search all the files on your system. For example, if you are in a web browser in OS X, under print and pdf you can instantly save a web page as a pdf file to a program like EagleFiler. Suppose later you can’t remember which library/folder you put in. Spotlight will have indexed the file within seconds of your saving it, so you can look it up from there and quickly access it.

EagleFiler is not the only software that takes advantage of Spotlight. Yojimbo and Journler are other examples. But the data in Yojimbo is contained in a SQL database rather than in directories of standard format files, a major design difference. Journler files are stored as .jrtfd files, and, as far as I can tell, can only be edited within Journler.

Whatever the data-storage approach, in trying out various note-taking and document-storage applications, their interaction with Spotlight has become of considerable interest because if Spotlight can index the data, then it provides an extremely fast, keyboard-driven means of accessing it.

Randall S