Apple recently showed off their work on Spotlight, file system searching using metadata and/or attributes stored alongside regular files. Dominic Giampaolo is working heaviliy on this new feature of MacOS X, and his genius coding abilities shine through.

Quite a few websites have reported on this new idea at Apple, but few have covered the historical significance of why it is important now. The idea of using metadata to describe file contents is not a new idea. SGML has been around for over 35 years, and is the precursor to the very HTML used to bring this news to you now. I realize that putting great metadata retrieval technology into an operating system without impacting performance is a thorny issue to deal with, but it certainly is not impossible, as demonstrated by the BeOS and now MacOS X.

So does Apple's recent push to show this technology off validate the ideas already developed in our beloved BeOS/Haiku?

I believe so. It's validation to me that one of the core ideas of the BeOS is entirely correct, and is something that others feel they must use or will in the future.

In my opinion, Apple is a very smart company, headed by a visionary who is shaping the future of an industry with every new product announcement in recent years. Apple is like Google in this respect; quiet, determined, and absolutely earnest in its self-belief that what it is doing is the correct way.

Was the BeOS ahead of its time? Again, I would answer that with a resounding yes! Look at all of the great features BeOS has to offer, and compare it directly against the pain of today's operating systems. Even the much-touted MacOS X is not as feature-rich when it comes to the user interface, although it comes close.

Before the critics start reaching for the rope and their thoughts turn to lynching me for speaking ill of the Church of Apple, I want to state one thing: I really like Macs. Honest. :)

There is plenty of room in the market for competitive operating systems, if you believe the numbers, so just calm down.

We're onto a good thing, no matter how you look at it. This push by Apple to extend HFS+ and add real searching features to their OS is a very cool thing indeed. It will certainly help their userbase get used to dealing with their stored information in ways more flexible than traditional hierarchical paradigms.

Here's to hoping they steal more ideas from us. :)