Comments on: How Apple Can Improve Spotlight Search (Or How Microsoft Can Beat Spotlight)

By: Christian

Christian — Fri, 29 Jul 2005 02:34:51 +0000

Application have to make Spotlight aware of their data in order to be included. I haven’t a clue as to how complicated this is, but hopefully someone will have the time to tackle this soon.

By: Jm

Jm — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 15:35:26 +0000

Wonder if spotlight can be adapted to search all files, not just the ones readable through default apple-provided applications. E.g. it reads Mail files, but not the mail on say Thunderbird. Shucks. Any ideas?

By: Christian

Christian — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 15:50:56 +0000

I hear you SunSeeker. Spotlight is certainly a 1.0 iteration at this point and we have many improvements to look forward to in future revisions.

In the meantime there is a hack to index networked volumes. It’s not perfect, but it is something.

Create Spotlight indexes for networked volumes

By: SunSeeker

SunSeeker — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 13:13:45 +0000

I am concerned about the way that our important files have to remain on our computer to be indexed and searched by Spotlight. I appreciate that I can store images and other files on a network hard drive, but I would like the ability to search files and view Metadata and image thumbnails that are stored remotely on CDs and DVDs.

Applications like Cumulus and CDFinder have offered similar features for some time and CDFinder will soon be updated to include Spotlight, but I would like to see it in Tiger along with the ability to backup the index for those non-changing archives onto my iDisk.

By: Jon

Jon — Tue, 10 May 2005 14:04:00 +0000

Wouldn’t it be great to extend Spotlight to include music? Couldn’t Spotlight analyze the audio patterns of an MP3 and recognize the tempo and general tone of the music? Dunno how that would work, but it would be great to just type in “Music female vocal downtempo” and get served up a list that includes some Zero 7 or Olive…