I HATE APPLE

You know what I hate though? Optima. Can't say why, exactly. It's the "Joy of Sex" font, and the "Planned Parenthood" font, and I can't look at the shampoo bottle in my shower now without being reminded of either those awful nude sex illustrations from the 70's or birth control.

Probably not as much as people are fearing. Basically, Spotlight is a front end to Tiger's database file system which allows for files to have metadata tags. It's very similar to the file system used in BeOS. Quoting from that article:

For the everyday user, though, BFS has much more tangible advantages. Any file or file type on a BFS volume can have arrays of metadata associated with it, in the form of "attributes." There is no limit to the amount, size, or type of attributes, and attributes can be displayed and edited, sifted, sorted, and queried for directly in the Tracker (Be's equivalent of the Finder). Because most attributes are indexed, search results are nearly instantaneous, regardless the size of the volume or the number of files being searched through. By default, BeOS ships with reasonable sets of attributes for common file types, but users are allowed to extend and customize these, and to create entirely new file types with entirely new arrays of attributes. In other words, the Be File System doubles as a database.

Users can use built-in filetypes with existing attributes, or create entirely new filetypes with custom collections of attributes. These files were used to deliver a dynamic web site out of the BFS database without using 3rd-party database software.

It is difficult to describe to users of other operating systems just how advantageous an operating system built on top of a virtual database can be. Only other BeOS users really seem to understand the power and flexibility of the database-like file system, and it is the single feature I miss the most from BeOS.

Copy your MP3 files' ID3 tags to Artist, Title, Year, Genre attributes. Sift and sort through your collection in the Tracker in almost anyway imaginable, or build playlists from MP3 attribute queries with far more flexibility than you get in other OSes.

BeMail messages store Subject, From, To, CC:, Date, etc. in attributes. Create virtual mailboxes based on live, instantaneous query results. This lets you obtain views of your email store that are irrespective of the actual folder locations of BeMail messages on disk.

Years ago, I created a custom file type based on text, with attributes for author, title, email, URL, etc. Then I wrote a CGI script in perl to extract and dish up these attributes over the web. In other words, I was serving up a database-backed web site without having to install or learn any database software whatsoever. That site now runs on LAMP, but you can see how the site was created here.

The OS-level metatags in BeOS was really really cool and I can't wait to see how it's implemented in Tiger.

xpost

I'm intrigued by the legal difference between Johnston and Gill Sans. Transport For London still claims ownership of Johnston and, especially, New Johnston - does the Strategic Rail Authority have any rights over Gill Sans?

I'm intrigued by the legal difference between Johnston and Gill Sans. Transport For London still claims ownership of Johnston and, especially, New Johnston - does the Strategic Rail Authority have any rights over Gill Sans?

Definately Original Johnston. I believe on Johnston the copyright has lapsed, Johnston himself having died more than 70 years ago but I don't know if a font can be trademarked as an entity in itself or whether it is is just the usage (Roundel, signage, map styles etc.) that is trademarked. I believe that New Johnston is under copyright and the move to new johnston was as much about having an important part of the coporate identity under copyright as improving clarity.

I shall persuade Ambrose to ask his Dad who knows about thses things.

As for Gill Sans, it's not been used on the railways for years. I'm not sure what is the type face is nowadays but it's not proper Gill Sans nowadays.

(*somewhere* I have a 1970-something issue of Modern Railways magazine with a "Ten years of the Design Panel" article)

* this may not have been what it was actually called - I'm sure it was Corporate Something, though.

I'm pretty happy w/the ST1040/TOS box I use for midi sequencing, heh.

standard font on my SUSE box = Black Chancery.

I was thinking about getting one of those mac minis, loading it up w/a 8x8 midi interface, a MOTU firewire 8x8 audio interface and using it as a replacement for my atari/hdr setup. Maybe I'm not so sure now. Ally + tombot on this thread are great!!

Arial is good for small font sizes on non-anti-aliased screens. If you don't have ClearType turned on and you're reading a small sidebar, Arial is what you want. Otherwise it's pretty ugly.

If you could push a feature request, or perhaps a bug on your
wish-list to the top of Apples' radar for OSX, what would it
be?
Kill Finder X. It's really that bad. But don't just
resuscitate Finder 9 -- do better. Finder 9 always needed a
toolbar, for example. Finder 9 needed a plugin architecture.
Finder X does trounce Finder 9 in terms of built-in search,
though.
There are people out there who know what the next Finder looks
like. Apple needs to get out of their way and let them deliver
it.
You seem like a guy who prefers to refactor rather than
rewrite, so I'm going to assume you wouldn't say that lightly,
and we'll just proceed on the assumption that Finder X is a
complete clusterfuck. How does a company known for its
innovation, craftsmanship and software skills let something
like Finder X out the door?
Finder X is the compromise between the Mac OS folks and the
NeXT folks. Neither won, everybody lost.
Oh my god, the entire bastardized notion of switching from
metal to aqua and hiding the sidebar when clicking on the
toolbar chiclet in the upper right-hand corner.
Bonus: notice how if you click on the extreme right of the
chiclet and try to switch back, you fail -- the window theme
switch moved the chiclet slightly to the left and now you've
got to follow it. Gag. Folks, this type of stuff makes Gnome
look good.
I don't know how Finder X shipped. Someone high enough must
be in love with it that the normal human interface vetting+
feedback process didn't/couldn't take place.

the thing in the upper right

Anyway, Tog says: http://www.asktog.com/columns/060MonsterMac.html

People need to stop being such cranks. Iterative improvments are going to come along.

Um. So I'm not saying there couldn't be a better Finder, but... is that really all the guy can find to complain about?

(maybe it's a joke)