Apple to Shine Spotlight on Desktop Search

[Brett_Tabke]

[vnunet.com...]

During his opening keynote at MacWorld Jobs claimed he will outperform the competition, allowing users search data on their hard drives such as documents, email messages and photos.

[whoisgregg]

Steve Jobs points out the competition in the keynote:

We previewed this to our developers this past spring and since then there have been a few Spotlight wannabes that have shipped, desktop tools. One from Google (looks like this), one from Microsoft, the MSN search tool (that looks like this) and they're great. But they're nowhere near as good as Spotlight. Now, why is that? Because when you build it in to the core OS you can just do things that you can't do with a tool on the side.

He later goes on to say that Mac developers can build Spotlight into their apps but I know I had the "closed platform" jitters when he first said "you can just do things that you can't do with a tool on the side."

You can watch a quicktime stream of the keynote [apple.com] and the spotlight portion starts 6 minutes, 50 seconds into the stream and you can just click ahead to that point.

[invader8]

The big thing that Spotlight provides for developers is the ability to aid Spotlight in its searches of file formats that it is not privy to. So, if I create a whiz-bang new app whose files have text in them, I can make them searchable by Spotlight by providing hooks. This way, Spotlight doesn't have to know the file format of every single file on the planet.

Being searchable by Spotlight is another bullet point that you can add to your app.