Part 2 of a series
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Hierarchical Nested “Smart Folders” and (more) Human Readable Queries

“Smart Folders” are great- you can create a search and then it is automatically updated- the problem is although they are called folders- they aren’t really; they are just little files that the OS pretends are folders. In this pat. application (20050289109) Apple takes the folder metaphor one step further and allows nested smart folders- This is a terrific idea that I hope makes it into the next version of the OS X Finder.

Basically, you create a “Smart Folder” (say Files modified last week) and then you can create more smart folders within the original folder (like Kind = images) and then create more folders within that subfolder (like Aperture = f7). Now, the power of this is that you can then change the top query from Files opened in January to Keywords = holidays and all of the searches below this update to reflect the change.

I don’t think they will actually put this feature into OS X 10.5 (Leopard)’s new Finder - Imagine how difficult it would be for first time users to understand the complexities of two different types of folders- smart and dumb! I hope I’m wrong and they do put this feature in I would love to organise my work in monthly folders all arbitrarily divided upinto different projects or different types of files. If Apple made tagging a file easy it make a powerful new Finder. mmmh, Chardonnay!

(more) Human Readable Queries

One of the problems with spotlight in its current incarnation is the wide gap between the mostly useless search box (only AND queries allowed) and the rather complex query language (example query: (kMDItemContentTypeTree = ‘public.image’) && (kMDItemLastUsedDate >= $time.today(-7)) ). It appears that Apple had greater plans for spotlight than made it out the door (perhaps features got dropped in the race to get it out the door in the OS X version before Vista would be released). The backend of spotlight seems remarkable but it isn’t matched by such refinement in the user interface.

Included in the pat. apps is a smarter, more flexible query language. This query language tries to distinguish between search terms and ‘keywords’ that might indicate time (yesterday) or kind (image file). Hopefully this will be incorporated into Spotlight and allow quick precise searches from the Spotlight box.

Other features allow searches being created from a selection of files by a “search using this file’s metadata” contextual menu for example. A search would be created and the user able to alter the metadata used for the search. This hints that better metadata might be a feature of the next generation Spotlight and this is covered in the next section.

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