Glimpse of Apple’s OS X 10.5 - Leopard in Pat. Apps?

Some Apple patents for Spotlight have recently surfaced and they show sides of the Finder we haven’t seen before.

Apple is expected to release the next version of OS X - 10.5 “Leopard” by the end of 2006 or early 2007. Little information has leaked about Leopard but rumours suggest that the Finder of OS X 10.5 (code named ‘Chardonnay’) is going to depend heavily on Spotlight (Apple’s metadata and search tool).
Improvements to the Finder include:

• New Spotlight User Interface
• Hierarchical Nested “Smart Folders”
• (More) Human Readable Search Queries
• better metadata creation- OCR, voice recognition, analysis of images etc

More details of the OS X Spotlight patents here