John Gruber has a good article on spotlight. There’s just 2 things that I think need to be cleared up:
Gruber said
The “spotlight” effect on System Preferences was wholly unrelated to Spotlight
. That’s not necessarily true. Unless he has some proof he hasn’t been sharing, that could very well actually be spotlight and just be restricted to, say, files ending in .prefpane, which it then takes and highlights the right one. On the other hand, it also could very well be a custom search or their own calls to SearchKit. As far as I know, only Apple knows the definitive answer and they haven’t said it.Gruber also said
Spotlight’s ability to show results from Apple Mail archives on Jobs’ machine was tantamount to a sham
referring to the fact that Mail now uses an exploded storage format. I’d just like to say that at the Spotlight session several people brought up concerns about this and asked if, in the actual release, Spotlight could support databases and other pseudo-file-collection objects. Of course, if that does happen I don’t know what the output would be like—how do you return part of a database as a file object? But if they can figure out a good way to do it, it may very well show up. Then again, it may not. Who knows?
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July 12th, 2004 at 6:21 pm
Well, Spotlight does return Address Book entries, correct? And, even though they can be exported as VCards, they are stored in a database, correct? If these are true, it seems Spotlight can indeed search and return records from a database. It may be that this has changed in Tiger, though.
July 12th, 2004 at 7:04 pm
Spotlight returns Addressbook entries? You sure? As of WWDC spotlight operated exclusively on files and they weren’t planning to make it support databases, although as I said several people requested it during the Q
July 12th, 2004 at 8:43 pm
In my article, ”’spotlight’ effect” is reference to visual effect, not whatever underlying implementation is being used to accomplish the pref pane searching. In other words, based on Jobs’s demo, it’d be easy to leave with the impression that the “halo” effect in the System Prefs searching feature is part of the Spotlight API. It is not.
July 12th, 2004 at 9:03 pm
Ah hah! Makes sense. Re-reading that bit, I can see how what you’re saying does in fact make more sense than my interpretation about the underlying implementation.