[Amorya]

Reading the Tiger webpages, it seems users can't add or edit metadata - only developers, who provide plugins based on filetype.

Is this true?

If so, do you think it'll still be a killer feature?



Amorya

[Horsepoo!!!]

Originally posted by Amorya:
Reading the Tiger webpages, it seems users can't add or edit metadata - only developers, who provide plugins based on filetype.

Is this true?

If so, do you think it'll still be a killer feature?



Amorya

Yes...it'll still be a killer feature.

And I don't know if it's true that it won't be user-editable. If it's not I'm sure someone will make a freeware or shareware app that lets you modify any file metadata.

Spotlight will be amazing. It looks dumb in System Preferences but it looks amazing for everything else. I can already see console emulators making use of this to find and sort through tons of ROMs. I can see Graphics Converter making use of it to tag image files. I can also see GC and emulators making use or CoreImage to modify images and game video on the fly.

[:dragonflypro:]

Originally posted by Amorya:
Reading the Tiger webpages, it seems users can't add or edit metadata - only developers, who provide plugins based on filetype.

Is this true?

If so, do you think it'll still be a killer feature?



Amorya

You will see a freebie MetaEditor.app put before the Tiger release. I'd bet the farm on it.

T

[larkost]

I think that the number of times you will want to manually edit the meta-data will be few and far between (although I am sure someone will provide a browser). More likely people will provide tools that do better jobs of indexing certain types of files, and allowing you to set some preferences on how they index those files (for example one that would provide searching on lyrics to mp3 files...).

Remember, this database will eventually corrupt itself (it will happen), and I am guessing that there will be a process similar to rebuilding the desktop database: toss it all out, and re-touch all of the files to get the info.

[Developer]

Where did you read anything about improved filesystem metadata in Tiger?

[Millennium]

I think a lot of people are confused over what metadata actually is.

Metadata is, simply put, "data about data". In the case of files, it's information about the file: its name, type, when it was created, and so forth. Except for the file's name, most metadata isn't something that should be changed arbitrarily, and certainly not within a search interface.

That said, some of the basic types of metadata will be changeable, but only in contexts where it makes sense to do so (i.e. not Spotlight). For example:

• File name - Change in Finder
• File label - Change in Finder
• ID3 tag contents - Change in iTunes
• EXIF contents - Change in an image-editing program
• Mail headers for outgoing mail - change in Mail
• Other metadata used by third-party programs - Change within the program that uses it.

What I think a lot of people are talking about when they say they want "metadata" is some kind of arbitrary text string they can change at will. Few people realize, though, just how useless this kind of metadata really is. In order for metadata to work properly, it must be kept up to date by some sort of agent that knows what to do with it. If you want metadata that you can edit, then the responsibility falls onto you to keep it up. This is a tedious process that can't really be automated very well, because if you want your own personalized metadata scheme then only you can possibly know what you want to do with it. Unless you can write your own software, I can guarantee that you will not be able to keep up with it all, and eventually the system will fall by the wayside.

This said, it's not as though it would be difficult to write a tiny program that did nothing but keep track of a "tag" metadata fragment for people to change at will. Apple has not chosen to do this, because they understand how useless that sort of metadata is; it cannot be kept up to date in any meaningful way, and metadata is all about meaning. Undoubtedly, of course, someone will implement such a program, and users will flock to it for about two weeks. Then they will see that it's not what they thought they wanted, and life will go on.

[Horsepoo!!!]

Originally posted by Millennium:
I think a lot of people are confused over what metadata actually is.

Metadata is, simply put, "data about data". In the case of files, it's information about the file: its name, type, when it was created, and so forth. Except for the file's name, most metadata isn't something that should be changed arbitrarily, and certainly not within a search interface.

That said, some of the basic types of metadata will be changeable, but only in contexts where it makes sense to do so (i.e. not Spotlight). For example:

• File name - Change in Finder
• File label - Change in Finder
• ID3 tag contents - Change in iTunes
• EXIF contents - Change in an image-editing program
• Mail headers for outgoing mail - change in Mail
• Other metadata used by third-party programs - Change within the program that uses it.

What I think a lot of people are talking about when they say they want "metadata" is some kind of arbitrary text string they can change at will. Few people realize, though, just how useless this kind of metadata really is. In order for metadata to work properly, it must be kept up to date by some sort of agent that knows what to do with it. If you want metadata that you can edit, then the responsibility falls onto you to keep it up. This is a tedious process that can't really be automated very well, because if you want your own personalized metadata scheme then only you can possibly know what you want to do with it. Unless you can write your own software, I can guarantee that you will not be able to keep up with it all, and eventually the system will fall by the wayside.

This said, it's not as though it would be difficult to write a tiny program that did nothing but keep track of a "tag" metadata fragment for people to change at will. Apple has not chosen to do this, because they understand how useless that sort of metadata is; it cannot be kept up to date in any meaningful way, and metadata is all about meaning. Undoubtedly, of course, someone will implement such a program, and users will flock to it for about two weeks. Then they will see that it's not what they thought they wanted, and life will go on.

I think the metadata most are thinking to modify is the metadata for pictures. While it's true that metadata is best handled automatically by an app that knows what to do with the file (iTunes fetching CDDB info or downloading songs with the ID3 tags already there) or TextEdit indexing keywords from a text file. Some metadata has to be handled by the user...such as pictures. However, iPhoto allows you to add keywords to pictures so this isn't a big concern.

But I can understand some people wanting control on some of the file metadata.

I use emulators to play old NES and SNES games. ROM metadata would be nice to have but unless someone decides to make an app that recognizes the ROM in question and fetches from some database the relevant metadata for those ROMs and adds it to Spotlight index, I'll have to add this metadata manually.

[Millennium]

Originally posted by Horsepoo!!!:
I think the metadata most are thinking to modify is the metadata for pictures. While it's true that metadata is best handled automatically by an app that knows what to do with the file (iTunes fetching CDDB info or downloading songs with the ID3 tags already there) or TextEdit indexing keywords from a text file. Some metadata has to be handled by the user...such as pictures. However, iPhoto allows you to add keywords to pictures so this isn't a big concern.

Also, it's worth noting that Spotlight appears to support EXIF metadata -a standard supported by most digital cameras- out of the box. So once again, picture metadata is automatic.

I use emulators to play old NES and SNES games. ROM metadata would be nice to have but unless someone decides to make an app that recognizes the ROM in question and fetches from some database the relevant metadata for those ROMs and adds it to Spotlight index, I'll have to add this metadata manually.

Richard Bannister, the more or less undisputed God of Emulation on the Mac, may able to help out there. Check his ROM Organizer app out; this looks like exactly the sort of thing which could be easily extended to do this.

[Horsepoo!!!]

Originally posted by Millennium:
Also, it's worth noting that Spotlight appears to support EXIF metadata -a standard supported by most digital cameras- out of the box. So once again, picture metadata is automatic.

Richard Bannister, the more or less undisputed God of Emulation on the Mac, may able to help out there. Check his ROM Organizer app out; this looks like exactly the sort of thing which could be easily extended to do this.

That's what I'm hoping...but RB said he had no further plans for ROM Organizer. I hope the WWDC (he's there right now) sparks a renewed interest. This would be a real boon for emulation on the Mac.

As for EXIF...sure, EXIF won't automatically add keywords to your picture such as 'elephant, zoo' which, IMO, are important as far as indexing goes.

[bborofka]

Originally posted by Millennium:
What I think a lot of people are talking about when they say they want "metadata" is some kind of arbitrary text string they can change at will. Few people realize, though, just how useless this kind of metadata really is. In order for metadata to work properly, it must be kept up to date by some sort of agent that knows what to do with it. If you want metadata that you can edit, then the responsibility falls onto you to keep it up. This is a tedious process that can't really be automated very well, because if you want your own personalized metadata scheme then only you can possibly know what you want to do with it. Unless you can write your own software, I can guarantee that you will not be able to keep up with it all, and eventually the system will fall by the wayside.

This is a good point, something I never really thought about before. One example of what you are mentioning is Microsoft Office 2004's Project Center. It lets you manually link all types of documents, emails, contacts, appointments, etc. to arbitrary "Projects". In theory, this sounds useful (and I admittedly wanted it built into OS X once I saw it in Office), but in practice it's tedious.

The whole point of this sort of metadata, I see, is to organize things that are relevant to each other. I'd have to use Spotlight for a while to really get a feel for it, but I hope it accomplishes what I'm describing. If anything, hopefully Spotlight will have some sort of centralized App ("Spotlight Center") so that you can save searches and see them updated in realtime as things happen in other Applications (ie: more emails sent to/received from someone).

[Amorya]

Originally posted by Millennium:
Also, it's worth noting that Spotlight appears to support EXIF metadata -a standard supported by most digital cameras- out of the box. So once again, picture metadata is automatic.

I was thinking more of metadata like iphoto stores, containing stuff about what's _in_ the pictures. Normally I search for things based on content, not format...

Amorya

[Brass]

Originally posted by Millennium:
I think a lot of people are confused over what metadata actually is.

Metadata is, simply put, "data about data". In the case of files, it's information about the file: its name, type, when it was created, and so forth. Except for the file's name, most metadata isn't something that should be changed arbitrarily, and certainly not within a search interface.

That said, some of the basic types of metadata will be changeable, but only in contexts where it makes sense to do so (i.e. not Spotlight). For example:

• File name - Change in Finder
• File label - Change in Finder
• ID3 tag contents - Change in iTunes
• EXIF contents - Change in an image-editing program
• Mail headers for outgoing mail - change in Mail
• Other metadata used by third-party programs - Change within the program that uses it.

What I think a lot of people are talking about when they say they want "metadata" is some kind of arbitrary text string they can change at will. Few people realize, though, just how useless this kind of metadata really is. In order for metadata to work properly, it must be kept up to date by some sort of agent that knows what to do with it. If you want metadata that you can edit, then the responsibility falls onto you to keep it up. This is a tedious process that can't really be automated very well, because if you want your own personalized metadata scheme then only you can possibly know what you want to do with it. Unless you can write your own software, I can guarantee that you will not be able to keep up with it all, and eventually the system will fall by the wayside.

This said, it's not as though it would be difficult to write a tiny program that did nothing but keep track of a "tag" metadata fragment for people to change at will. Apple has not chosen to do this, because they understand how useless that sort of metadata is; it cannot be kept up to date in any meaningful way, and metadata is all about meaning. Undoubtedly, of course, someone will implement such a program, and users will flock to it for about two weeks. Then they will see that it's not what they thought they wanted, and life will go on.

Did you ever use the BeOS? The user-extensible meta-data usage there was great! Somethings need to be edited manually, as it is user-defined.

The one thing I'd like to see added back into metadata is file types and creator codes (or perhaps better known as open-with codes). To be precise, they are still in metadata in OS X (in the filename), but the file name is a completely inappropriate place for it (won't discuss it here, as it's been done to death a zillion times).

I'd like to see a MIME or similar file type, and a field for default application (for the per-file cases where you don't want it to open in the default application for that file type).

The current Mac OS X implementation is a real kludge, and is dying for spotlight-type metadata implementation.

[Chris Grande]

Originally posted by Amorya:
I was thinking more of metadata like iphoto stores, containing stuff about what's _in_ the pictures. Normally I search for things based on content, not format...

Very true, I have become very proficent at adding Keywords/ Comments/ Titles to images once I download them off my digital camera, and I even went back and added it to old photos that I brought in to iPhoto (version 4 had me using it more and more due to its speed). Currently for Spotlight to find a picture of 'Bob', the word 'Bob' would have to be in the file name. Spotlight needs to become iPhoto aware, so that a search would show photos and possibly even Albums/Rolls in the results.

Also, it should be aware of iChat logs and maybe categorize them as Conversations, because currently it just calls them documents and it looks odd.

On the user editable end, their is a keywords field that appears on files, just no way to add a keyword.

I'd like to see a MIME or similar file type, and a field for default application (for the per-file cases where you don't want it to open in the default application for that file type).

You can currently do this via get info, just change the Open with... attribute, the default action is to only effect that file, but you can click change all to effect all files of the same type.

[Brass]

Originally posted by Chris Grande:
You can currently do this via get info, just change the Open with... attribute, the default action is to only effect that file, but you can click change all to effect all files of the same type.

Yes, but the implementation is a kludge, and for the "change all" part, at least, it is still dependent on the file name extension (which is in itself a kludge for the sake of Windows users and Windows compatability).

[Phoenix1701]

Originally posted by Millennium:
What I think a lot of people are talking about when they say they want "metadata" is some kind of arbitrary text string they can change at will. Few people realize, though, just how useless this kind of metadata really is. In order for metadata to work properly, it must be kept up to date by some sort of agent that knows what to do with it. If you want metadata that you can edit, then the responsibility falls onto you to keep it up. This is a tedious process that can't really be automated very well, because if you want your own personalized metadata scheme then only you can possibly know what you want to do with it. Unless you can write your own software, I can guarantee that you will not be able to keep up with it all, and eventually the system will fall by the wayside.

I'm sorry, but I must respectfully disagree with that entire statement. The current system of file organization relies on pathnames, which -- while not implemented as metadata for each file -- essentially consistute exactly the sort of manually editable attribute to which you're referring. We have abstracted it out now so that we think in terms of moving things around in folders, but a unix command like "mv /foo/bar/baz /eeny/meeny/minie/moe" presents another way of looking at it -- we're simply changing the file's path attribute. This is different from a set of "keyword" metadata only in that is more limited -- it is an ordered list rather than a set, and we need all of it to find our file at all; with keywords, you only need one to find the file, albeit not necessarily to identify it uniquely. Yes, such a system would require manual upkeep -- so does our current organizational structure. If we were able to find metaphors and techniques that made it easy to change file paths, who is to say we can't do the same for keywords? Take a look at how Gmail does it, for example. It's so deceptively obvious a solution, it will make you slap your forehead and exclaim, "how come I didn't think of that first?!"

To call such a thing useless, I must confess, strikes me less as a considered opinion and more as a summary write-off. User-editable keyword metadata could very well solve many of the problems inherent in a tree-based directory structure, and at this point Apple could have it almost for free. I don't expect Apple to make every folder a smart folder, of course, but I for one would love to dump everything in my (huge) Documents folder into a single flat list and start assigning things keywords, rather than trying to decide whether my most recent icon set for a college programming project should go in the "Schoolwork", "Graphics", "Icons", or "Programming" folder. No matter which one I pick, I'll have to search all of them when I go to look for it months from now, because it's a sure bet I'll have forgotten by then. I would love to see Apple build keywords into Save dialogs; if such a dialog defaults to the Documents folder, I could essentially do away with the folder hierarchy entirely. Well, except for name collisions; everything has its flaws.

[Synotic]

Originally posted by Horsepoo!!!:
As for EXIF...sure, EXIF won't automatically add keywords to your picture such as 'elephant, zoo' which, IMO, are important as far as indexing goes.

I'm not completely familiar with the EXIF data structure, but checking PHP's 'exif_read_data()' function, it seems that it has a comments attribute that you can edit. If you want to edit this, then you can simply use iPhoto to edit your comments (more in depth below)

Also, Chris, have you actually used Spotlight?

Originally posted by Chris Grande:
Currently for Spotlight to find a picture of 'Bob', the word 'Bob' would have to be in the file name. Spotlight needs to become iPhoto aware, so that a search would show photos and possibly even Albums/Rolls in the results.

It does? It needs to? Is this based on an actual usage of Spotlight or just a passing observation? Note that I haven't even used it, but you seem to just be passing these off as facts, so I was curious. It just seems to be completely against how Spotlight seems to work (from all the information we have available).

The Spotlight database can maintain any metadata about any file it wants. Like I mentioned earlier, it seems that EXIF supports comments, which someone claimed earlier, Spotlight does keep in its database. Even then, for things that EXIF can't support (does anyone know if EXIF can be extended with custom data?), iPhoto can simply access Spotlight via whatever method Apple makes available and add any appropriate metadata it needs.

If all the data you need is currently in the EXIF data, and Spotlight does indeed use the EXIF data, then Spotlight should currently work fine, searching for the photos you need, by keywords, titles or descriptions. However, it wouldn't surprise me that if right now, as Tiger's in alpha level, that iPhoto photos are only tagged with either keywords, titles or descriptions, not all three. From what I can see, there's just a one generic "comment" field but there might be more. I'm 95% sure however, that by the time iPhoto is updated (either small update for Tiger or iLife '05), that any data kept by iPhoto will be available to Spotlight.

I have to agree with Millennium, that, at this point, with what little information we have about Spotlight, that manually using our own keywords to create our own distinctions and relationships would be too tedious to maintain. I do think however that metadata should be editable... in an appropriate manner. Including the examples of changing file names, file labels in the Finder and changing descriptions, titles and keywords in iPhoto.

The one potential use for arbitrary user editable metadata that I don't think will be addressed by Tiger is project based relationships. It would be interesting if, the folders themselves that files are contained in were part of a file's metadata. So that all your Keynote presentations, Word documents and InDesign slides were in the "Japan Project" folder. Then you could simply search for "agriculture japan presentation" and find the appropriate Keynote presentation. The "Japan Project" could be in the "Work" folder and then you could simply do a search for "work agriculture". Perhaps you do research on several regions and want to find all your agriculture information on them.

This idea (I think) furthers Phoenix's idea of the path name itself being part of a file's metadata. I don't know if it truly is, as in whether it's within the Spotlight database about each file, and can be searched, but it might be interesting if it was. The main problem I can see however, is that folder names may conflict with file names. If you wanted to search for "library books" (list of current checked out library books), should it display the tens of thousands of files within the Library folder because "/Library/" is part of each of those files metadata? Perhaps if it was restricted to certain root folders like Desktop, Document etc... But then it necessitates either an app or some sort of method of deciding where you want the "file path as metadata" to be applicable. In the end, it just might be too complicated.

I still don't think that the whole arbitrary keywords to documents approach would be a useful one... but for those who really want it, it seems that Spotlight can search through the comments field of files. This seems like a perfect opportunity to use keywords to create relationships or further describe files.

Phew, I wasn't expecting to write that much. I can't wait to actually try out Tiger once it comes out

P.S. I haven't used BeOS, so I'd actually be interested on how useful arbitrary user edited metadata is. I'm guessing that it extends beyond the "any text you want in the comments" idea where you create your own relationships?

[Diggory Laycock]

SpotLight works by using plug-ins - Whenever a file is changed, moved or altered the file is read by the plug-in for that File Format.

If you wanted ROMs to be indexed by spotlight - they'd need ID3-like metadata within the file itself - I suspect that the ROMs don't work like that and any meta-data is kept separately - by the "organiser" app.

http://daringfireball.net/2004/07/sp...t_on_spotlight

As others have said - spotlight is for reading, not writing meta-data.

If you want a file-type indexed by spotlight you'll need a plug-in written. If you want to edit the metadata then use an application that edits the file.

[Mr Scruff]

Originally posted by Millennium:
What I think a lot of people are talking about when they say they want "metadata" is some kind of arbitrary text string they can change at will. Few people realize, though, just how useless this kind of metadata really is. In order for metadata to work properly, it must be kept up to date by some sort of agent that knows what to do with it. If you want metadata that you can edit, then the responsibility falls onto you to keep it up. This is a tedious process that can't really be automated very well, because if you want your own personalized metadata scheme then only you can possibly know what you want to do with it. Unless you can write your own software, I can guarantee that you will not be able to keep up with it all, and eventually the system will fall by the wayside.

Totally disagree. Let's say I have some tag that I want to use to link a group of files, eg 'Project'. It would be trivial to create a droplet which I could drag a file onto to add this piece of metadata. The process of maintaining metadata is only tedious if the interface used to do it is poor.

I'm sure Apple could come up with something compelling in this area.

[Chris Grande]

Originally posted by Synotic:

Also, Chris, have you actually used Spotlight?

It does? It needs to? Is this based on an actual usage of Spotlight or just a passing observation? Note that I haven't even used it, but you seem to just be passing these off as facts, so I was curious. It just seems to be completely against how Spotlight seems to work (from all the information we have available).

I have used it, and currently Spotlight has no idea about any of the information one enters in via iPhoto. This is probably due to the fact of iPhoto storing all its information in its own special database, and not actually tagging the files. Spotlight knows the photos are there and has indexed their EXIF data, if I search for 1600x1200 I find a massive list of photos. However searching for Keywords/Albums finds nothing. So either Apple has to let Spotlight in on how to read the iPhoto database and relate to the actual files or they need to push that information out onto the images themselves.

I'm not really worried since it seems like something Apple is already aware of and think of some way to get working.

[Moose]

Originally posted by Mr Scruff:
Totally disagree. Let's say I have some tag that I want to use to link a group of files, eg 'Project'. It would be trivial to create a droplet which I could drag a file onto to add this piece of metadata. The process of maintaining metadata is only tedious if the interface used to do it is poor.

I'm sure Apple could come up with something compelling in this area.

They did already, and the interface looks like this:

[Horsepoo!!!]

Originally posted by Chris Grande:
I have used it, and currently Spotlight has no idea about any of the information one enters in via iPhoto. This is probably due to the fact of iPhoto storing all its information in its own special database, and not actually tagging the files. Spotlight knows the photos are there and has indexed their EXIF data, if I search for 1600x1200 I find a massive list of photos. However searching for Keywords/Albums finds nothing. So either Apple has to let Spotlight in on how to read the iPhoto database and relate to the actual files or they need to push that information out onto the images themselves.

I'm not really worried since it seems like something Apple is already aware of and think of some way to get working.

Yeah...you shouldn't worry. The developer build is actually already very old (2 months maybe?) Steve was showing a build that was more recent (how much recent, nobody knows...but the fact that Automator looked a bit more refined than Pipeline and the GUI differences leads me to believe there is a huge difference between the dev build and the keynote build.) Spotlight will evolve and iTunes, iPhoto, iWhatever databases will probably be merged into one (using CoreData perhaps?) and Spotlight will be able to get the data from one central place.

I wouldn't judge Spotlight by the way it works in the dev build.

[natan]

I also hope that there will be some sort of 3rd party extension (or a convention to be quickly adopted by all developers, and then Apple) for arbitrary metadata keywords on all files. If we had an unlimited about of labels, they would serve the purpose fine (however, you couldn't have multiple labels for one file still).

If path name searching works well (which I assume it will), that'll be one step forward. However, that still assumes that all your files that you want to associate together will be in the same dir or branch. This isn't a great assumption; even many power users I know have their files in some sort of disarray at one time or another. Also, it still doesn't let you flexibly assign multiple keywords/labels to one file.

If Spotlight indexes a file's comments (accessible in the Get Info inspector), and lets you search for individual words/phrases in the comments, this should be enough to satisfy me. For instance, I could put the following string in the comments for lecture notes: "linguistics 106, guest professor, psycholing" and a Spotlight search for any of those keywords would reveal the file.

Furthermore, it would be really easy to make a contextual menu extension for these "keyword labels", you could setup a list of them (or have a "New Keyword..." item that pops up a dialog asking you to list a new keyword) and just enable/disable as many keywords as you want for a file. Simple GUI, simple solution. If it worked, I'd be 100% happy with Spotlight.

Can anyone with the WWDC build installed check to see if Spotlight searches comments? If so, I'll start coding the above contextual menu this week.

[cybergoober]

Originally posted by natan:
Can anyone with the WWDC build installed check to see if Spotlight searches comments? If so, I'll start coding the above contextual menu this week.

Spotlight does not find any keywords I enter in the Comments field...

[Millennium]

Originally posted by Diggory Laycock:
SpotLight works by using plug-ins - Whenever a file is changed, moved or altered the file is read by the plug-in for that File Format.

If you wanted ROMs to be indexed by spotlight - they'd need ID3-like metadata within the file itself - I suspect that the ROMs don't work like that and any meta-data is kept separately - by the "organiser" app.

Actually, this depends on the format of the ROM and the system it's for. Almost all ROMs have some form of metadata embedded, but it is usually neither editable nor extensible. So although Spotlight might be useful for searching on this metadata, the user would have to know what it is first.

[Horsepoo!!!]

Originally posted by Millennium:
Actually, this depends on the format of the ROM and the system it's for. Almost all ROMs have some form of metadata embedded, but it is usually neither editable nor extensible. So although Spotlight might be useful for searching on this metadata, the user would have to know what it is first.

Indeed...all someone would need to do is write a plug-in for Spotlight to fetch ROM info...just like SNES9x Custom does with SNES ROMs:

Snes9x version: 1.43-dev
Mac port version: v60, OS X

Name: CHRONO TRIGGER
Speed: 31/FastROM
ROM Map: HiROM
Type: 02
Kart contents: ROM+RAM+BAT
Header ROM Size: 32Mbits
Calculated ROM Size: 32Mbits
SRAM size: 8KB (64Kbits)
Actual Checksum: 788C
Header Checksum: 788C
Header Checksum Complement: 8773
Output: NTSC 60Hz
CRC32: 2D206BF7
Licensee: Square
ROM Version: 1.0
Region: USA/Canada

There might be a need for more metadata (which would have to be tacked on or stored somewhere else) but with this metadata, the ROM could be called "blurp" and searching for "Chrono" in Spotlight should bring "blurp" up because Chrono was the hardcoded ROM name.

Also "Square" should bring up all SquareSoft games.

All the other hardcoded ROM metadata would probably be useless though since most wouldn't search by region (most console games are USA/Canada, Europe, or Japan...the criteria would yield results that are way too broad.)

There would probably be a way to filter all SNES or NES or Genesis etc. games via Spotlight without much effort.

If Richard Bannister tweaked ROM Organizer to allow Spotlight to read some extra 'tacked-on' metadata. People could tag games with a set of genre keywords such as "action", "rpg", "puzzle", "simulation", "adventure" and a search for those words in Spotlight would bring up the games that fit the genre.

[Horsepoo!!!]

Originally posted by cybergoober:
Spotlight does not find any keywords I enter in the Comments field...

Relax...you're not a developer and shouldn't be playing with the dev build. Spotlight is still buggy and rough around the edges. There are things that haven't been implemented yet. If you seriously think Apple Spotlight in it's current state but in a year from now, you're grossly mistaken.

I know you're just responding to natan but there's simply no need to.

[cybergoober]

He wanted to know so I told him

[Horsepoo!!!]

Originally posted by cybergoober:
He wanted to know so I told him

You're breaking an NDA...if you really are a developer.

[natan]

Originally posted by Horsepoo!!!:
You're breaking an NDA...if you really are a developer.

Ah, right. I'm sorry I asked about that.

I'm assuming Apple will do a good job with Spotlight. They have Dominic G. on board, which is all that really matters in terms of this field

[clarkgoble]

What I think a lot of people are talking about when they say they want "metadata" is some kind of arbitrary text string they can change at will. Few people realize, though, just how useless this kind of metadata really is.

I disagree. Combined with a robust query language arbitrary text is amazingly powerful. Being able to specify not only arbitrary text but a "label" it is associated with is very powerful. Not only that but it would be simple for application authors to write applications using this. As others mentioned, BeOS, did this in a very useful fashion. One would hope that the final version in Tiger would improve upon BeOS' capabilities.

What would be very powerful, and that a few others have touched upon, is using metadata to organize *relationships* between documents. Ideally such a tool would have a good UI. But you really end up with some very nice features.

[cybergoober]

Originally posted by Horsepoo!!!:
You're breaking an NDA...if you really are a developer.

Not really, but whatever...