From kottke.org :
An Apple employee made some very interesting comments on Slashdot regarding what OS X, and in particular, Spotlight, the OS level search application will be able to do in the future. I’ll just quote from the article.
You’re doing a multi-party teleconference. A recording is made of that teleconference (each angle), and separate audio tracks are recorded for each participant. In real time, your computer transcribes each voice track and stores it as ancillary content on the recording, content that Spotlight indexes for you. At any time, you can type “meeting in San Jose” into Spotlight, and it’ll take you right to the angle and track on which your co-worker Laurent talked about next week’s meeting in San Jose.
Another amazing example…
Let’s say you take ..[a].. picture of your dog and drop it in a Pages document, then export the document as a PDF and mail it to your sister Jan. The computer records, as metadata, the fact that that picture of your dog is related to Jan. It knows that.. [you].. associated the picture with that Pages document, that the Pages document was associated with the PDF file, and that the PDF file was associated with an e-mail to Jan.
There are some more things mentioned in the article, but, it’s just mind blowing where they are going with this. Steve Jobs has been accusing Microsoft of shamelessly copying from Apple. If this is the kind of stuff Microsoft wants to copy, then, I don’t think anybody will complain (except Apple of course).
If this kind of technology is implemented in Windows, it better have an efficient and easy data backup system. If a user spends years builing up metadata and relationships between his/her data, and one fine day Windows crashes and requires a fresh install, well, screwed. Having just reinstalled Windows today, that’s what I’m thinking of right now.
My exposure to OS X has been minimal at best. If only their computers weren’t so expensive……