Membranophonist’s Ramblings

As will be possible with the 10.4 System Preferences, users should be able to locate applications using Spotlight queries based on functionality-derived keywords.

Although I had the original idea a while ago, I was prompted to revisit it by Jef Raskin’s “The Humane Interface” in which he discusses both incremental searching of the sort Spotlight provides and clear labeling of features and commands, which got me thinking about how little idea many application’s names give the user of their functionality.

Many users think of their browser as being The Internet. “Where is my Internet?” “I can’t open my Internet.” “My Internet doesn’t work.”

Alternative keywords could include IM or the name of a protocol such as Yahoo, MSN, or ICQ.

For the geeks! Ideally, the user could input “bash” (or any available shell name), select a terminal emulation program, and then activate it, opening a new shell window in the shell the user input as a query.

Developers would be advised of several guidelines regarding keyword-application mappings:

• Use broad categorical terms that refer to the content your application handles such as “pictures” and “images” or “video” and “movies” or functionality your application provides such as “screenshot” or “file compression”.
• Only a certain number of keywords (TBD by the Spotlight engineers) would be recognized and indexed by Spotlight, so give the selection process some solid thought.

Some developers would abuse this feature and spam up the keywords like they were HTML meta-tags, but that would only lead to user frustration with their product because the user wouldn’t be able to find the functionality the application erroneously implied it provided. The benefit of keyword spamming would also be somewhat mitigated by the limited number of keywords Spotlight would use.

This may well already be in the works, based on the Spotlight section header image on the Apple page, but I have no idea what the logical relationship between Yosemite and Keynote is. Anyone?