[cpac]

After seeing the new Tiger features I was initially unimpressed (wow - more .Mac syncing? more video chatting?) But the more I thought about spotlight & automator, the more I am impressed.

In short, with Spotlight, we have instant client folders that collect and link every document having to do with a single client - whether they are emails, iCal entries, excel spreadsheets, .pdfs, or word documents. Moreover, there's no need to constantly save a copy of an email to particular folder or vice-versa. This is VERY POWERFUL - and well beyond the current capabilities of various third party solutions.

Second, with Automator, we have finally brought much of the power of Applescript (if not more in some areas) to the masses. Depending on how well it is implemented, I can imagine creating office workflows that prepare client billing sheets pulling info from an address book card, an excel spreadsheet, compiling them in TextEdit (or Word, or Nisus, or whatever), converting the whole thing to a .pdf, and attaching it to a preformatted email.

In short: wow.

Before you could hope to do this kind of stuff with DayLite or NUTD or similar, but nothing was nearly as slick as these two products (especially used in tandem) promise to be.

Now to start up my own office....

[SupahCoolX]

Smart folders are a good complement to all this too. Depending on what data is available, you could have all documents in the past month containing a certain client's name, or email address, etc. to keep everything together.

[Horsepoo!!!]

Spotlight brings indexing of anything that wants to take advantage of the engine.

Looks like right out-of-the-box, you'll be able to find any relevant mail, document, contact, spreadsheet, word document, PDF, image/picture, video, iCal entry without having any of the apps associated with them open via the little searchbox.

This in itself is amazing.

Sure, this is like Launchbar, but more powerful obviously, and people will get this free. Most people don't know what Launchbar is anyways so Apple is just eliminating the steps of knowing about Launchbar, finding it on the net, and downloading it and making it part of the OS.

Spotlight is huge! Too bad it looks fugly for things like finding the relevant system preference in System Preferences.

This is definitely one of the answers to metadata people wanted. I wonder though when or if a DB filesystem is coming...and whether it would be faster than what we've seen today.

[neoTony]

What would be the point of a DB-based FS? The content indexes are stored in SQLlite by the looks of things... storing files in databases would not necessarily give any performance gains at all.

HFS+ isn't bad for what it does. I can't wait to play with Tiger

[Horsepoo!!!]

Originally posted by neoTony:
What would be the point of a DB-based FS? The content indexes are stored in SQLlite by the looks of things... storing files in databases would not necessarily give any performance gains at all.

HFS+ isn't bad for what it does. I can't wait to play with Tiger

Actually...someone pointed out that it's a good thing that this search engine is on top of the filesystem since this would work with any filesystem instead of being locked into one filesystem.

So I guess this is good.