“Some Apple patents for Spotlight have recently surfaced and they show sides of the Finder we haven’t seen before. Apple is expected to release the next version of OS X – 10.5 ‘Leopard’ by the end of 2006 or early 2007. Little information has leaked about Leopard but rumours suggest that the Finder of OS X 10.5 (code named ‘Chardonnay’) is going to depend heavily on Spotlight (Apple’s metadata and search tool),” hrmpf.com reports.
Improvements to the Finder include:
• New Spotlight User Interface
• Hierarchical Nested “Smart Folders”
• (More) Human Readable Search Queries
• better metadata creation- OCR, voice recognition, analysis of images etc.
More info and images form the patent apps are here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “David” for the heads up.]
See also hrmpf.com’s related article “Apple, Chardonnay, Leopard and Spotlight” here.
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With Vista being a ringer of a knock-off of OSX, including–and let’s be fair here–some improvements, I really hope Apple makes 10.5 the quantum leap over 10.4 that OSX was over OS9.
Apple needs to change the game again on Microsoft. Not just by ensuring that 10.5 is more secure, easier to use, and with better functionality, but Apple needs to really beef up the eye candy.
Yes, eye candy for the stores, the online reviews, and drumming up the community matters.
I hope we seen an epic leap. It’s absolutely critical to the viability of Apple given Vista is once again, a “good enough” upgrade backed by $100,000,000 worth of marketing which will prevent switchers from making the move.
This is the advancement I’ve been waiting for. I use spotlight a lot and like smart folders for some things, but still keep my old folder system. However, the nested hierarchical smart folders will probably be my method if they work as depicted on those pages. A key reason is cross-referencing, which is currently a major problem with my manual folder system of managing thousands of PDFs. Hey, I love making aliases as much as the next person, but I could really get into simply downloading the PDF and knowing it is already in the folder for the 4 or 5 different areas under which it should be filed.
I’m hoping for something good and usable.
Still runiing 10.4.3 on the old 500mhz G3 iBook I keep at work, for ‘personal use,’ and 10.4.4 on my G4 at home. Honestly, I’ve been toying with the idea of going back to 10.3.9 on the iBook just to free up some resources. I don’t use widgets on the iBook and had to max out the ram when I upgraded to 10.4. Don’t think there would be many ‘above-the hood’ features that I would be losing by downgrading. iTunes maybe…
Opinions?
The finder part with the image preview looks similar to what XP is currently doing with thumbnails and slideshow. It’s embarrasing that XP beat us to it. Very nice feature to add to OS X, can’t wait.
‘voice recognition, analysis of images’
Didn’t somebody from Apple (Phil Schiller?) years ago talk about your Mac ‘recognising’ and reacting to you. May this is why there’s an iSight in most new Macs. How about ‘my face is my password’! ‘Welcome Joe, I have some new mail for you, and your mother called’.
Looks like the Knowledge Navigator is becoming real!
“Then I want to browse the UNIX file system that’s hidden from the Finder.”
In Finder select Go> Go to folder> and enter /private in the box.
Voila’ all the Unix crunchy goodness.
Tinkertool also lets you make all the invisible files and folders visible.
Alcohol obsession? First “whine” from MacBook Pros, and now Chardonnay.
I bet there’s going to be an iBar in iLife ’07. Lets you share drinks, find drink recipes, and mix drinks with special hardware.
Hah.
Oh well. Finder needs a fix. Hopefully Apple will do what they need to do to beef up Finder enough so that it’s good again.
Only thing is.. I don’t quite know what the point of Spotlight integration in Finder is. Why give Spotlight support to Finder when Finder and Spotlight are two very different methods of doing ultimately the exact same thing?
Sort of like integrating a cooler into a refrigerator.
Mr. Bill,
Dashboard is my life! I want to see Apple improve this more than anything else in Tiger. There is so much room for improvement with Dashboard it is sick! I could never go back to Panther for this reason alone (and the GUI speed increase was nice, too).
What’s with Apple’s obsession with French (spit, spit) words? First Rendevous, then Bonjour, now Chardonnay? Why not use good ol’ American words: Hey There, What’s Up, or Brewskie?
Maybe the possible law change in France that could affect iTMS will cause Apple to stop using those damn frenchie words.
MW: end, as in “End the $%^*%$ frencHie madness!”
What’s with Apple’s obsession with French (spit, spit) words? First Rendevous, then Bonjour, now Chardonnay? Why not use good ol’ American words: Hey There, What’s Up, or Brewskie?
Maybe the possible law change in France that could affect iTMS will cause Apple to stop using those damn frenchie words.
MW: end, as in “End the $%^*%$ frencHie madness!”
What’s with Apple’s obsession with French (spit, spit) words? First Rendevous, then Bonjour, now Chardonnay? Why not use good ol’ American words: Hey There, What’s Up, or Brewskie?
Maybe the possible law change in France that could affect iTMS will cause Apple to stop using those damn frenchie words.
MW: end, as in “End the $%^*%$ frencHie madness!”
What’s with Apple’s obsession with French (spit, spit) words? First Rendevous, then Bonjour, now Chardonnay? Why not use good ol’ American words: Hey There, What’s Up, or Brewskie?
Maybe the possible law change in France that could affect iTMS will cause Apple to stop using those damn frenchie words.
MW: end, as in “End the $%^*%$ frencHie madness!”
What’s with Apple’s obsession with French (spit, spit) words?
Champagne, Chevrolet, Cadillac, Porsche. Obsession is French.
Mr Bill,
Ya — got me a G3 800 MHz iBook running 10.4.5, and discovered that Tiger sucks down the RAM more so than Panther did – contemplated returning to 10.3.9 Panther, but Tiger’s networking capabilities with PCs is better, which is important to me — I could care less about Spotlight on a slow G3, and don’t use widgets — miss the old find file, which did not exclude some system level directories/files like Spotlight does.
Niffy