Re: New Spotlight Info
Re: New Spotlight Info
- Subject: Re: New Spotlight Info
- From: j o a r <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 9 Nov 2004 08:15:14 +0100
On 2004-11-08, at 23.58, John C. Randolph wrote:
Has anyone read anything about the ability to add meta-data to files
w/o writing an importer, i.e. to use the system as an alternative to
Classic resource forks?
That's not the purpose of Spotlight. If you want to do the kinds of
things we used to do with the resource fork, use a file package.
What about legacy file formats without any built in support for meta
data, like perhaps TXT? I guess that the answer is that they're going
to be supported only in the most basic way (date created, et.c.) by
Spotlight?
I think it would be nice with some guidelines for developers, helping
them to design their file formats in a way that makes them suited to
work as sources for meta data queries. Perhaps NSDocument /
NSFileWrapper should be extended to provide a standard implementation
of meta data storage? I think it would be good if you didn't have to
write a custom meta-data plug-in for every application.
I also think that this is a bit weird:
===========================================================
Once the meta-data plug-in is built and has been tested, you make it
available for Spotlight's use by putting it into one of the following
directories:
~/Library/MDImporters
/Library/MDImporters
===========================================================
Why not also search the application wrappers per default
(My.app/Contents/MDImporters)?
In that way each application would not have to come up with a way to
ensure that it's importers in other places in the file system are
installed and up to date.
Finally (and if none of the above was, this definitively is OT), I
think it's clear that there eventually need to be a global, cross
platform, standard for arbitrary read+write meta data capabilities for
files (ie. also for keys not supported by the application that defines
the file format).
As Apple's market share doesn't really allow us to easily dictate new
standards I guess we either have to wait for M$ to come up with
something, or to team up with them or other key players to try to
define one. I hope that's something being looked into.
j o a r
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