Outliners and Spotlight

Posted by Chris Thompson
Apr 13, 2008 at 02:27 PM

Good post. Just to clear up one misconception, files don’t have to be in a non-proprietary format for Spotlight to index them. Applications supply metadata importers to handle their own proprietary formats, which is why you can do things like search for text inside OmniGraffle drawings. Actually all of the single pane outliners supply their own metadata importers, they don’t depend on the system default importers. This all happens transparently behind the scenes so you may not realize it.

The value in this system isn’t its uniqueness… the Windows indexing service can do this too, including allowing for custom importers… it’s that developers have adopted the technology universally. Every application you use supports Spotlight, so it is a dependable universal search of all documents on your system. Apart from Microsoft, I’m not aware of any mainstream developers who ship Windows indexing service importers. Maybe this will change in a few years as Vista develops momentum.

Also, Spotlight is leveraged in some neat ways. For instance, if you plug in a USB key containing an application that’s not installed on your system, the system uses Spotlight to find the applications on that key, add it to the launch services list (the list of applications you see when you right click a file and choose “Open with”), as well as pick up all the sundry little things that come with the application (metadata importers, QuickLook plugins, etc.). So as soon as you plug in the USB key, all the applications on it just become available to you, immediately.

BTW, if you like Eaglefiler, you should also check out Leap:
http://www.ironicsoftware.com/leap/
and Together:
http://reinventedsoftware.com/together/
They’re both closer in concept to Eaglefiler than the monolithic database applications like Yojimbo or Devonthink. Leap is interesting in that it discards the concept of a database entirely. It treats the filesystem as its own database; every view in Leap is a live Spotlight query.

—Chris