Extending Finder and Spotlight

Posted on December 18, 2012 by Stefan Laketa

This is an idea I’ve had in my mind for several years, but never written down in a blog post. Since my blog post about the latest iTunes 11 application got some attention I decided to finally write down my thoughts regarding an extension to Finder and Spotlight I think would help a lot of people.

I haven’t really used Linux for many years and have no idea if something similar like this already exists on Linux. If you know something like this, please contact me via Twitter or app.net. The concept I will describe is probably something that could be done in Windows and Linux, but since I’m a Mac user I will focus on that platform.

Unfortunately I don’t have nice movies that demonstrate the desired behaviour, but I’ve made some screenshots. Since the functionality operates in a “off desktop mode”, like Time Machine, I’ve used a system background image (/Library/Desktop Pictures/Milky Way.jpg) to make it more similar Time Machine.

So let’s begin!

See files in their contexts

Have you ever searched for a file in Spotlight and wanted to know how that file is used? The search result you get in Spotlight only groups your result according to file types. But if you search for an image, you can’t see where you’ve used that or where you got it from in the beginning. Imagine if you could trace a file’s use and origin through this extension!

Let me try to visualize this for you.

Imagine that you have a PSD-file, history-tracker.psd, and enter this “mode”.

It automatically gets selected and shows you the flow chart of the file to its left and right.

We can see that we got the file in an email and that we have exported jpgs from it. Great! But what if we want to see if we got any more files in that email? You could e.g. right/control-click on the Email.emlx and choose something like “Focus”, since left-clicking a file should not make that selection lose focus of the first object we had as the origin.

When the email is set to the new origin or focused file, the flow chart re-arranges itself to show the new flow. (For clarity, I have omitted the left part of the email, but it should show you the contact information for the sender.) As we can see, the email contained several files of different types. But how do we make the group of files easy to browse through? Just like Apple did with the stacks in the Dock.

Conclusion

Other scenarios could be

tracing a file and see what documents that are importing/linking this file (e.g. in InDesign)
tracing where you have used a logo or image in word processing documents like Pages and Word

Since I’ve never looked into the API for Spotlight, I have no idea if it’s possible for an “ordinary” application to bring this kind of functionality to OS X. I guess that to get full support in every app, one have to use plugins and that will probably never happen. And considering the sandboxing of Mac App Store application, we will definitely never see an application in the Mac App Store that will give this kind of functionality.

So I think that only Apple could make something like this work on the Mac.

When I worked as a Mac OS X consultant a couple of years ago, now and then I got questions from clients that wondered where they used a specific file or where they got it from. This could be one step closer to helping them in those kinds of situations.

Posted in Apple, Mac

Cure(?) for the “breaking news”-mania

Posted on December 12, 2012 by Stefan Laketa

There has been some discussion regarding the concept of breaking news and the urge for tech news sites to be first to post about something happening, even though they haven’t confirmed it yet. It seems that it’s more important to be first than to be correct.

We all know this. The page view race seems to make the sites to forget the main purpose of news sites, at least in my view, to provide accurate news.

My suggestion is as follows:

Never put an unconfirmed “breaking news” story as the top story. As long as it’s not confirmed, it’s not news. At that point it’s just a rumour or speculation.
Mark the unconfirmed “breaking news” story with something visible, say a different background/border/headline color or a clearly visible tag saying “UNCONFIRMED” or “RUMOUR”.
When/if I read that story, begin the story with stating that it’s unconfirmed or just a rumour. Not all visitors are going through the start page, so it’s important to make it really obvious that it’s not confirmed.

All these points are very easy to implement, but the question is; are the tech news sites willing or even interested in doing this?

Posted in General

Concept for a revised iTunes app

Posted on December 4, 2012 by Stefan Laketa

The much awaited iTunes 11 was released last week and we were many that had high hopes for this new version, but I believe that a lot of people want to see a more slimmed and focused version of the iTunes application.

Do you remember the old iTunes where it’s sole purpose was to take care of your music library in a great way and play your favourite songs? I would really like to have that back again.

My suggestion is as following:

Make iTunes.app an application for music ONLY. Not this bloated one as it is now.
Make the store(s) a separate app, e.g. iStore.app.
Make a syncing application for all the syncing needs your iPad or iPhone have.

Let’s look closer at point 1.

iTunes.app only for music

Compare the handling of photos in your Mac. You don’t do it iTunes, but in iPhoto. The only thing you do in iTunes regarding photos is simply choosing the albums/photos you want to sync with your iOS device. This should also be true for your music library. In that way iTunes gets to be the music player it once was.

Here’s a modified version of the iTunes 11.app. (It’s the Swedish version.)

I have basically just removed the two top right buttons. But the gains of stripping iTunes.app of all the “bloated” (it’s bloated if you only want a music player) code should be considerable.

Make the store(s) a separate app, e.g. iStore.app

Why not have a universal (not in the universal Intel/PPC sense) application for all of the stores now residing in the current iTunes application?

In the above screenshot I’ve removed the Library button in the upper right corner and the huge LCD-like display in the top center section.

Make a sync app for all the syncing needs your iPad or iPhone have

I know that iSync is probably not the best name for such an application, considering the legacy of the now-dead syncing application in earlier versions of (Mac) OS X, so I will call it something like iHub for this discussion. iHub could focus completely on syncing and probably be a quite small application running in the background.

Caveats

How should we manage books?
One way would be to offer an app similar to (my new) iTunes or iPhoto. An application that focuses on books and where you can actually read your books on your Mac.

It’s a mess to find and run all different apps just to listen, buy and sync media!
Well, that is probably true for some people, but there could be easy to find icons in the different applications that can open the other ones. The point of this post is to get more focused and efficient versions of the different tasks that we usually do with our iOS related media.

And there are probably more things I haven’t thought of, but I want to start a discussion on how Apple can improve iTunes. You can find me on Twitter or on App.net.

(Well, English is not my native language, it’s Swedish, so please forgive me for any bad or wrong spelling. I do hope and believe that you will understand my points in this post.)

Posted in Apple

A temporary change of the site’s design

Posted on December 4, 2012 by Stefan Laketa

The redesign of the site is loooong overdue, so this will be the design in the meantime. Since I work almost full-time and studying part-time while taking care of our two daughters (and my wife) my plans for the redesign have been postponed numerous times. Sorry about that.

Posted in General

I’m back!

Posted on April 16, 2012 by Stefan Laketa

I’m finally back after six months of paternity leave. This means that you will probably see some new posts coming in the near future. I’m also considering a design update of the site (adding some colours!) and hope to have it ready in a couple of weeks.

Stay tuned!

Posted in General