John Gruber has written an in-depth look at Apple’s filesystem work and Tiger’s new Spotlight search technology by John Gruber. Since the introduction of OS X, Apple’s HFS+ filesystem has taken a lot of abuse “from the peanut gallery,” but it has seen steady improvements, and Dominic Giampaolo (of BeFS fame) has extended it further to support Spotlight.
I personally very much hope that disabling “Spotlight” will be possible.
I am not going to upgrade to 10.4 if it is not going to be possible. I like OSX as it is, and until now (and since OS 8), every indexing technology attempt by apple has only annoyed me – sometimes because of “too high” efficiency, too.
I prefer more controllable, open technologies such as QS which i discovered recently, ore none at all.
they forgot to write John Gruber a few other couples of times in the article
I have played with Tiger a bit and it seems that Spotlight is pretty transparent. You will not really notice any indexing the way the old Sherlock was. All indexing is done on the fly and I noticed no slowdown in the system at all.
So far I have been pleased with Spotlight and like it much more than I thought I would have. It would be nice to turn off the lights in the Preferences panel though but I don’t see myself using the search bar there anyway.
search based interfaces to the file system is the future R2. you will have to conform eventually.
One really bad thing in Tiger is that the Finder still does not monitor files.
If you save a search and create a Smart Folder, all the changes made in Terminal are immediately reflected in the “Smart Windows” but not in the normal ones or on the Desktop.
It’s obvious that the author is not a very highly technical person with some of the things said in his article. It appears he is a web designer/tech “geek”.
1. He’s wrong, Mac OS X IS UNIX with a “Mac-like” GUI. While legally, BSD isn’t UNIX, technically and really, it is. Strip off the GUI, we have Darwin.
2.) Metadata IS stored in files (or inodes, if you must) on the file system.
“He’s wrong, Mac OS X IS UNIX with a “Mac-like” GUI. While legally, BSD isn’t UNIX, technically and really, it is. Strip off the GUI, we have Darwin.”
I don’t think he was talking about how it technically worked, but more of how people approached using it, either coming from a unix backround or a MacOS backround, and that eventually the user would end up using it more like MacOS than unix with a window manager.
correct me if im wrong guys, but isnt this very, very similar to winFS? a relational database of filesystem metadata with a low level api… what gives me goosebumps is that its updated on the fly. no disk indexing. i want a mac sooooooooooooooooooo bad…
Nah… but it is very similar to BeFS. Another few years of development like this, and OS/X may even surpass BeOS! :^)
I still think, eventually, HFS will have to be replaced. No immediate need it seems… 🙂
“Cupertino, start your photocopiers.”
[Reference from some ancient esoteric BeOS factoid]
Dominic puts a double-cheeked meaning to that phrase. By that, I’m not referring to BeFS or Konfabulator, but some of Dominic’s youthful brashness which he may, or may not, wish to be reminded of. 😉
It is like WinFS in that it uses meta data. Spotlight seems to do some indexing right after a fresh install of course. I didn’t notice any slowdown in the system itself but Spotlight didn’t return results as fast. It got a lot faster after a few hours of use and now I notice no slowdown.
I would hope that Finder would be updated before Tiger ships to use the same internal/kernel mechanisms that spotlight itself uses to be notified of new files.
That way you would no longer need to call FSNotify for files to show up (or wait for Finder to ‘notice’)
John is 100% right… You are missing the first point entirely and his second point is specifically referring to type/creator metadata… Which is relatively unique, as far as I know to the Mac, and it IS stored in the file system.
Maybe you should get a clue… At least before speaking about someone else’s level of knowledge.
Overall, this indicates that the “core” Spotlight is much closer to the BeOS solution than what could be concluded from Steve’s presentation.
About resources and other things: because soemthing is referenced from the inode doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s part of the primary byte stream of the file.
About type/creator: the original BeOS filesystem, a.k.a. ofs (“old filesystem”) used type/creator pairs that were direct clones of the MacOS ones.
I do not mean to undermine the work that Dominic has done for Spotlight but people that keep saying this is a BeFS clone are not correct.
Spotlight consists of three components of which Dominic mainly worked on one – reread the above article for the details. Also, I remember a rumour back in the 10.1 – 10.2 days that stated that Apple was working on a dbfs.
Whatever the date was, this was before Dominic joined Apple because I remember reading later that he went and asked for the job rather than Apple approaching him.
So, once again, I do not mean to undermine his contribution but I get irritated that people are always bringing up the “clone of BeFS” statement – especially without further knowledge of its capabilities.
e.g. CoreData is said to extend Spotlights abilities to the network despite Apple downplaying that ability. I think they do not want alot of focus/attention brought to that especially the MS vs. GOOGLE vs. YAHOO thing going on.
They do not want the media latching onto that ability and then comparing it to things like the products from the above-mentioned comapnies and procaliming that Apple has the weakest offering for internet searches – which is not the “intended” primary purpose, rather “desktop search” + “internet connectivity/ability”.