I just installed the new version of Mac OSX. Holy cow, it is awesome. Safari now tracks RSS feeds. It alerts me when one of y'all posts to your blogs and can show bookmark folders all aggregates together into one document like a livejournal friends page. RSS is really deeply integrated into Safari now.
The new search function will let you search for the same old same old stuff, except you can now search through your mp3s by what's in the header, your iphoto library by your description, your iChat archives by what you said, your bookmarks, etc etc etc. All that metadata is now in use.
Let's say you don't know what metadata is. Highlight the term and then ctrl-click on it. A menu comes up. Do you want to search for it on Google. Search for it on your hardrive. Look it up in a dictionary? There are all these nifty mini-applications that let you access your data in different ways. I look forward to the day when we don't have who applications, just tool sets. Cuz a set of well integrated tools would be more useful than a heavyweight application.
metadata |ˈmetəˌdatə; -ˌdātə|
noun
a set of data that describes and gives information about other data.
Apple didn't invent any of these ideas, but it's implementing them very well. This is a transitionary operating system. In the future, we won't think of files and folders, we'll think of tags like on gmail and of finding things by searching. Somebody had to replace CVS before then. Also, I want feed generation to be as easy as feed reading. I think a lot of that stuff, backups, feed generations, etc comes with .mac. Maybe I should stop being too cheap to subscribe.
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