Outliners and Spotlight

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Posted by Randall Shinn
Apr 13, 2008 at 02:01 PM

One of the great surprises of switching to OS X Leopard has been the usefulness of Spotlight, the operating system’s built-in indexing and search utility. It works so well and quickly at finding and launching applications and documents that I couldn’t see any reason to install either QuickSilver or LaunchBar, two excellent keyboard utilities.

There are many PIMs being created for OS X, so discussion of them is a hot topic in the Mac world. One point of discussion is whether or not the documents that show up in the viewing pane are best contained in a proprietary format or a standard one such as rtf or pdf. The latter approach ensures future portability, and it also means that Spotlight can locate the documents virtually instantaneously.

A good example of software like this is EagleFiler, which is where I’ve moved almost everything that I used to store in programs like MyInfo, UltraRecall, and Zoot. In EagleFiler files are stored in directories and subdirectories in their native formats. What EagleFiler provides are ways of organizing those files: such as an indexed, hierarchical overview of the files in a folder (“library”), searches, and smart folders that find all files that match specified criteria.

You can have as many libraries as you like in order to divide your files up into groupings that you prefer. The difference that Spotlight makes is that it can search all the files on your system. For example, if you are in a web browser in OS X, under print and pdf you can instantly save a web page as a pdf file to a program like EagleFiler. Suppose later you can’t remember which library/folder you put in. Spotlight will have indexed the file within seconds of your saving it, so you can look it up from there and quickly access it.

EagleFiler is not the only software that takes advantage of Spotlight. Yojimbo and Journler are other examples. But the data in Yojimbo is contained in a SQL database rather than in directories of standard format files, a major design difference. Journler files are stored as .jrtfd files, and, as far as I can tell, can only be edited within Journler.

Whatever the data-storage approach, in trying out various note-taking and document-storage applications, their interaction with Spotlight has become of considerable interest because if Spotlight can index the data, then it provides an extremely fast, keyboard-driven means of accessing it.

Randall S

Posted by Chris Thompson
Apr 13, 2008 at 02:27 PM

Good post. Just to clear up one misconception, files don’t have to be in a non-proprietary format for Spotlight to index them. Applications supply metadata importers to handle their own proprietary formats, which is why you can do things like search for text inside OmniGraffle drawings. Actually all of the single pane outliners supply their own metadata importers, they don’t depend on the system default importers. This all happens transparently behind the scenes so you may not realize it.

The value in this system isn’t its uniqueness… the Windows indexing service can do this too, including allowing for custom importers… it’s that developers have adopted the technology universally. Every application you use supports Spotlight, so it is a dependable universal search of all documents on your system. Apart from Microsoft, I’m not aware of any mainstream developers who ship Windows indexing service importers. Maybe this will change in a few years as Vista develops momentum.

Also, Spotlight is leveraged in some neat ways. For instance, if you plug in a USB key containing an application that’s not installed on your system, the system uses Spotlight to find the applications on that key, add it to the launch services list (the list of applications you see when you right click a file and choose “Open with”), as well as pick up all the sundry little things that come with the application (metadata importers, QuickLook plugins, etc.). So as soon as you plug in the USB key, all the applications on it just become available to you, immediately.

BTW, if you like Eaglefiler, you should also check out Leap:
http://www.ironicsoftware.com/leap/
and Together:
http://reinventedsoftware.com/together/
They’re both closer in concept to Eaglefiler than the monolithic database applications like Yojimbo or Devonthink. Leap is interesting in that it discards the concept of a database entirely. It treats the filesystem as its own database; every view in Leap is a live Spotlight query.

—Chris

Posted by Randall Shinn
Apr 13, 2008 at 08:15 PM

Chris, thanks for clearing up the misconception, and for pointing out Leap and Together. As a new OS X user I’m finding it hard to keep up with the new applications being released that are designed to take advantage of various features of the operating system, such as Spotlight. The ease with which many applications can interact is another surprise.

I think it was you that pointed out Things, and I love using it for task management, even in beta development.

Randall

Posted by jamesofford
Apr 14, 2008 at 02:19 AM

I have been using Eaglefiler and Devonthink for a while now, and have found Devonthink to be a little bit better than Eaglefiler. Partly this is due to my lack of abiity to use Applescript, and the number of different Applescripts that exist for Devonthink. The User community for Devonthink seems more active as well. There has been considerable discussion about when Devonthink 2.X will come out, and I am hoping that some of the clunkiness of the current version will go away. For instance, in Devonthink you can only have one database open at a time so it is not easy to copy between databases.

Jim

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