Below is a letter to Mr. Arik Hesseldahl regarding his article, “Apple’s Tiger Has A Powerful Nose” on Forbes.Com.
Dear Mr. Arik Hesseldahl,
I think your requested feature of allowing Mac users using Spotlight to search based on Application is the wrong analogy to the way people work.
What Apple and many of the more visionary technologist are trying to do, is to hide the complexity of computing from end-users and to make their technologies behave and understand terminologies in the context of the end-users’ environment.
Referring to an application is too computer focused and legacy (Windows) thinking. For example, if you’re looking for a letter you wrote, you would not first think about which type or brand of pen you used to write that letter, but rather you would think about the letter’s context.
This is why the new Spotlight feature is allowing for terms like “Images”, “CMYK”, “RGB”, “document”, “Movies”, “Presentations”, etc. as filters for the search. These are the terms that the respective end-users (in their industry) will be used to plus it is tool agnostic.
There are some fairly good directions in Spotlight, which Apple is promoting, in terms of Usability. Why didn’t you mention that? For example, the ability to use Windows terminologies as keywords in the Finder implementation of Spotlight.