Google does not forget about the Mac and goes on promoting innovation, even if what I'm going to talk about will only rejoice the geekiest of us.
On its Mac-dedicated blog, Google has announced the release of a SpotlightFS plugin for MacFUSE.
Uh? Let me explain:
MacFUSE is a Google Code project aiming to port FUSE to OS X. FUSE (for Filesystem in USErpace) is a UNIX kernel extension allowing users to create and use any kind of filesystems without having to write a dedicated kernel extension (
more details on Wikipedia.) Roughly, FUSE allows for virtual filesystems.
One of the interesting FS module is an NTFS one, that allows
writing to NTFS volumes, when most UNIXes (and OSX) can only read them, thanks to Microsoft's closed specifications.
The latest release is SpotlightFS, a filesystem based on... Spotlight. It allows to have
real "smart folders" instead of ".plist" files masquerading as folders. The point? Try drilling down a "smart folder" in column view or in an open/save dialog? Doesn't work, because it is NOT a folder. Pretty dumb, uh? And I'm not talking about "smart playlists" in FrontRow (that's different but the same frustration). So SpotlightFS allows you to create real "smart folders" that are populated live with actual symlinks to the files matching the Spotlight query.
So, SpotlightFS is really only for geeks, but if someone can do it for Google Code, Apple should be able to do it.