Spotlight makes it into Longhorn

Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
Golly, Steve didn't seem to be kidding about the "Start you photocopiers" comment.









And even though "Piles" haven't made into OSX as of yet, their close cousin "Stacks" seem to have found their way into Longhorn as well. What are they using for security at the patent office anyway?









Awwwwww, and look! A cute little syncing app!



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Comments

  • Reply 1 of 24
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    You know, I predicted a year ago that the major pieces of Longhorn were going to be back ported to XP, and Longhorn itself had the chance of becoming their Copland.



    Well... FastSearch, Avalon, and Indigo are now all going to be ported back to XP.



    What's left as a carrot for users in Longhorn? I can see it being a huge boon for developers, with the fresh codebase and all, but other than supposed security improvements, what, really, is the draw for users to upgrade now?



    Other than new apps *requiring* it, of course, but that's the stick. What's the carrot? What's left to make Longhorn the must have upgrade?



    It'll be interesting to see what they pull out of their hat, if anything.
  • Reply 2 of 24
    buonrottobuonrotto Posts: 6,368member
    Well, to be fair, MS had the Spotlight type of search tech coming for a long time. The syncing app just makes sense IMO too. The "stacks" thing, however, well, I'm not sure it's very useful from what I can see there. Love that they searched for "Steve" though.
  • Reply 3 of 24
    Before spotlight was released, I was adiment on the inclusion of piles in the next coming versions. I know many of us here pressed Apple for that feature, and it seems like Microsoft is listening. However, now with the inclusion of spotlight, the whole point of stacks and really finder has become obsolete. Is there any reason you would want to spend the time using a pile when you can simply type. It seems in the coming versions of OS X, we will see less and less ways of directly moving and viewing folders and files, but just accessing them through search.



    I think Apple has realized this, and Microsoft like usual has not.



    -macrules101
  • Reply 4 of 24
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    Well, it just gives them another bullet point on the feature list without actually providing anything *useful*... sounds to me like business as usual for MS marketing... \
  • Reply 5 of 24
    the cool gutthe cool gut Posts: 1,714member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Kickaha

    What's left as a carrot for users in Longhorn?



    I could be completely wrong, but I was under the impression that back porting to XP was being done, so that applications being written for Longhorn would still *work on XP. XP would not necessarily be able to take full advantage of those features, if at all.
  • Reply 6 of 24
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Kickaha

    You know, I predicted a year ago that the major pieces of Longhorn were going to be back ported to XP, and Longhorn itself had the chance of becoming their Copland.



    Well... FastSearch, Avalon, and Indigo are now all going to be ported back to XP.



    What's left as a carrot for users in Longhorn?




    Bug fixes and security patches for the holes introduced by these new features?
  • Reply 7 of 24
    chrisgchrisg Posts: 239member
    Apple had something like this in on of the Jag or Panther Betas... where they would badge the dock icon of a unresponsive application. For some reason they removed it.



    The UI seems interesting, I kind of like the glass look and how it blurs the UI underneath the UI. Kind of funny how we saw this effect in IE 5 on Mac OS 9, remember how the address bar was transparent and blurred the content under it.
  • Reply 8 of 24
    Quote:

    Originally posted by ChrisG



    The UI seems interesting, I kind of like the glass look and how it blurs the UI underneath the UI. Kind of funny how we saw this effect in IE 5 on Mac OS 9, remember how the address bar was transparent and blurred the content under it.




    Man, if those windows were side-by-side, how would you know which one has the current focus? What a nightmare. And we complain about a non-distinct visual focus indication in OS X.
  • Reply 9 of 24
    zenatekzenatek Posts: 203member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by ChrisG

    Apple had something like this in on of the Jag or Panther Betas... where they would badge the dock icon of a unresponsive application. For some reason they removed it.



    The UI seems interesting, I kind of like the glass look and how it blurs the UI underneath the UI. Kind of funny how we saw this effect in IE 5 on Mac OS 9, remember how the address bar was transparent and blurred the content under it.




    I really hope that Apple integrates some feature like this to eliminate the Beach Ball on a program stall.
  • Reply 10 of 24
    atomichamatomicham Posts: 185member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by the cool gut

    And even though "Piles" haven't made into OSX as of yet, their close cousin "Stacks" seem to have found their way into Longhorn as well. What are they using for security at the patent office anyway?





    By the way, when MS invested $150M a few years back, weren't they granted permission to use Apple's patent portfolio? Their use of "stacks" may be through that arrangement. I'm not positive--just throwing out an idea.
  • Reply 11 of 24
    buonrottobuonrotto Posts: 6,368member
    The reason Apple ditched the Dock badge/alert on a hung process is because they found that many if not most of the hung processes were just really busy and would recover just fine when they were done. If they kept the alert, people would force-quit the apps needlessly. You'd never get anything done in Photoshop.



    Thing is, from what I can tell, that "stacks" implementation tells you how many files it found under some criteria, and that's all. It doesn't seem to let you browse them on the fly, and the stack icons aren't terribly representative of just how many hits it found. You still have to look at the info/status bar for the real number. Seems like a perfect waste. Nothing the other search functionality in those Longhorn shots (and in Tiger) doesn't give you in more and better detail.
  • Reply 12 of 24
    atomichamatomicham Posts: 185member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by BuonRotto

    The reason Apple ditched the alert on a hung process is because they found that many if not most of the hung processes were just really busy and would recover just fine when they were done. If they kept the alert, people would force-quit the apps needlessly. You'd never get anything done in Photoshop.



    I agree. I've never understood people's dislike of the beach ball. Simple. You have the beach ball over a window? That app is non-responsive. We don't need some asinine dialog box taking up space to tell us that.



    Where Apple needs to fix the beach ball is that if the non-responsive app is front-most, don't make the beach ball global. In other words, it should only be the rainbow over the window or if you try to click on an Application's pull-down menus. I have had people complain that an App hangs and they can't do anything because of the beach ball (of course, all they had to do was click anywhere out of the app, but it isn't apparent).
  • Reply 13 of 24
    slugheadslughead Posts: 1,169member
    Uh "spotlight" was said to go into longhorn even before 10.3 came out.



    by spotlight I mean fast search and indexing and stuff, as displayed in the picture above.



    This is why WFS was going to be so "innovative." Instead, Longhorn's dev team bitched and moaned their way back into NTFS.



    And yet it's still going to push 2006.



    Anyway, M$ didn't come up with "spotlight" either, stuff like DBFS has been around for a really long time. Invented by Sun micro IIRC.
  • Reply 14 of 24
    the cool gutthe cool gut Posts: 1,714member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by slughead

    Uh "spotlight" was said to go into longhorn even before 10.3 came out.



    Yeah, I just thought they would try their own "unique" implementation of it. That just looks like a shitty version of Apples implementation.





  • Reply 15 of 24
    pbpb Posts: 4,255member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by atomicham



    Where Apple needs to fix the beach ball is that if the non-responsive app is front-most, don't make the beach ball global.




    It is not global. If an application is stuck or busy (even the front-most one), the beach ball appears only when the mouse pointer is on a window belonging to that application. Move the cursor somewhere else and the beach ball disappears.
  • Reply 16 of 24
    I like how in the Longhorn search results there are multiple columns filled with meta data about your files. It looks like you can even sort. While I know the Spotlight results menu can sort, but does the Finder search results in Tiger allow you to sort your search results while in the grouping view?
  • Reply 17 of 24
    skatmanskatman Posts: 609member
    Hmm... considering the Gates anounced system wide desktop indexed search at CES 2003 and spotlight is already available on XP, I'm wondering who is copying from who?
  • Reply 18 of 24
    Quote:

    Originally posted by skatman

    Hmm... considering the Gates anounced system wide desktop indexed search at CES 2003 and spotlight is already available on XP, I'm wondering who is copying from who?



    \\



    Like I said, the idea is nothing new. MS has clearly copied Apples execution of it. Do you really think that hack on XP is anything like Spotlight?
  • Reply 19 of 24
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    Sorry.



    Spotlight is *not* in XP. Longhorn's search capabilities are to be backported to XP, but not yet.



    There is a little magnifying glass icon in XP, if that's what you mean.



    MS actually has been talking about this sort of thing since 1997... yet Apple has the patent on the basic concept. Oops.
  • Reply 20 of 24
    buonrottobuonrotto Posts: 6,368member
    Spotlight already in XP? Huh? Or do you just mean search? The Mac OS already has indexing and search abilities too. Spotlight is specifically a search method using old, new and improved technologies and concepts. I'm sure that MS, Apple and everyone else who has come and gone has some sort of prior art that's similar to Spotlight in concept if not in detail.



    The issue isn't the "what," it's the "how. And the old who did it first argument is rather inane IMO. That's always bothered me about the Windows-stole-the-desktop-from-Macs mantra. The question is, whose implementation will prove more useful to users?
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