I’ve been thinking a lot lately about buzzword web technologies such as AJAX and Ruby on Rails. These technologies, while exciting in comparison to the web of the recent past, are destined to become obsolete within the next 1-2 years. It’s not the fault of the creators of these innovative technologies that they are destined for extinction - it’s the HTML and HTTP technologies that are holding everything on the web firmly back to the early 90s roots of Lynx and NCSA Mosaic, with the notion of the Web Browser as the people’s terminal and the Internet itself in terms of hypertext pages.

The hypertext construct is hindering the ability to rapidly create and enjoy truly integrated software experiences that leverage the data strength of the cloud but provide the rich multimedia experience of a desktop app. Instead of zillions of Ruby On Rails apps, I propose what we’re going to see transform the whole notion of the Internet is more applications like Google Earth that are true to the spirit of using the hardware on your desk to its fullest - hell - the game industry is already fully embracing this kind of thinking with World of Warcraft - try doing that in a browser!

Some interesting further reading:

• Death to the Browser
• Death of the Browser
• Flash to Jump Beyond the Browser

Introduction

After about a year of Spotlight in Mac OS X, I’ve found that its newness has worn off. Sure, it’s still forward-looking even in relation to where the ill-fated Windows Vista is headed, but in many ways it feels like a downgrade to me from the simple inline search in Panther. Think I’m crazy? Read on…

Embrace the Dark Side with Predictive Search

Let’s say I was searching for a file that I know is called “WebsiteLayout3.psd,” but I can’t remember where I put it. The predictive search mechanism, while flashy, innovative, and press-worthy, makes the assumption that I am so clueless about what I’m looking for that I want to search my two 300-gig drives (full of thousands of nested folders) for each combination of the initial letters in the filename, and any typos I might make along the way. I haven’t heard my drives chug like this since System 7!

It’s gotten so bad that I’ve resorted to typing my search queries into Stickies, then copy-pasting to Spotlilght so that I can circumvent the predictive search mechanism. Let’s make the assumption that I’m somewhat unusual - all Apple has to do to fix the problem is put in a checkbox to enable/disable predictive search in the Spotlight System Preferences Pane. How hard would that have been? They could still have it enabled by default to garner all the media hype they wanted in the first place, without irritating people like me who want to make more narrow, targeted queries.

Modal Madness

Why does a Spotlight window have to be a different mode than a regular Finder window? The UI is really odd and confusing, particularly the way in which you narrow the search based on path with textual buttons that are placed underneath the title bar in a muted font. Spotlight already wants to act as though it’s behind the scenes, in the background of the whole OS, but in actuality it’s just a mode of the Finder. Think about it for a minute - What is the Finder for? It finds your stuff - it always has. Let’s expand the concept and realize that all Spotlight has added is a persistent search menu and some strange modal windows to the Finder’s set of tools.

Power Tools

What if I want to do a Boolean search, or use Grep syntax? Sure, most people don’t know or understand what these are, but what about those of us who want to have some powerful searching built into our OS? Again, it can be disabled by default.

Back to the Future

The integrated search in Panther was (almost) perfect. Sure, it didn’t search emails, wasn’t metadata-savvy in the same way that Spotlight is, but it was a lot faster, more efficient, and had a much less obtrusive UI. I love having a persistent search menu, but I wish it worked like a smarter version of the Panther integrated Finder searching.

Spotlight 2.0

Let’s have it! Here’s my proposed feature list:

• Optional (rather than forced) predictive search
• Seamlessly integrated into the Finder (no wacky modes)
• Boolean and Grep query syntax support