It’s really sad, because they mostly aped search from BeOS and had best in class search for a decade or so. Now indexing frequently breaks or works when an external disk is not attached, but won’t find local files after it’s connected.
It’s really sad, because they mostly aped search from BeOS and had best in class search for a decade or so. Now indexing frequently breaks or works when an external disk is not attached, but won’t find local files after it’s connected.
It is sad, and as one of the several former BeOS employees who went to Apple to add our experience to OSX, I can say that most of us have moved on. This isn't to say that others can't do what we did; they certainly should be able to. The OSX team back then was much smaller and we all had a maniacal attention to detail. One reason is that we were micromanaged by Steve J. and did lengthy weekly reviews with him and he was direct and brutal. He wasn't always right, but he did have the final say. This is all gone and even though Steve Lemay (now head of UX) was there during this time, he was also present during the overall rot of the user experience.
Hi Pavel. I remember your work on Eddie and Tracker and Queries. Do you still follow the development of Haiku (even if infrequently)?
/meta let me just say how cool it is to cool it is to make a comment on HN and have responses from folks who worked on legendary teams. Thanks for your work on BeOS.
Are you the man who helped work on the new Apple file system / spotlight after working on BeOS' filesystem? If so, thanks!
Dominic Giampaolo may be who you’re thinking of. He’s shown up on HN before, IIRC.
Cool.
Now that we are living in The Future, I am dumbfounded how e.g. dynamically populated lists change their content reliably to something I did not want, during the phase of interaction where my finger is descending onto the target. Click! Not what I want.
Feels like a lost art which will be "discovered" again in the next 15 years.
Why do filesystem indices get stale? The OS can track what files get accessed, isn't inotify watertight?
I know that Windows has some equivalent stuff, that the antivirus uses to disallow opening files before they got scanned, so I'd wager that API is functionally required to not miss any changes.
Yet Windows indexing is one of the worst pieces of software in existence and frequently gets out of sync.
Even with inotify failing, if the system is plugged in and idle, it could quickly do a scan for files with update date > last known indexed time and index those. Like once per day maybe. Wouldn't take much load or memory, IMHO.