Lazycoder

Online applications and search

: “How do you search an application? Help documentation, maybe, but a full application? Sure there are things you want to associate with your application so it shows up in Google, but is that really searching an application? “

See, here is where the world of Web 2.0 and the actual world we live in diverge. Search. Businesses want you to use their online application to power your business/life. Let’s look 2-5 years down the line if we follow that route. How do we find the things we’ve stored online? Does every application have it’s own search engine?

Desktop applications have had to deal with this for years. Both of the major OS developers came up with a solution. Metadata. OS X has Spotlight and Vista has…Vista File Search (I guess, ToDo: replace with actual name of Vista MD tech later). Now your desktop applications can add specific metadata, or fill in existing metadata slots, so that you can search your multi-gigabyte hard drives for that document you wrote 5 years ago.

Online applications, whether they are built with Flex or AJAX+HTML are sandboxed. They can’t touch the hard drive (as far as I know, has something changed with Flex?). So they are prevented from saving any metadata to the hard drive. The best they can do is allow the user to export the file from the online applications, attach the metadata as best they can before the export, and save the file to the local system. For that to really work well, the online application will have to find out what OS you are running. Which is possible. But what metadata will get exported? How is it entered in the application?

My solution would be to find some way of importing your “tags” from different online applications into your local file metadata storage. The problem is, at least on OS X, the “Spotlight comments” don’t pull from any defined vocabulary. So some kind of Finder plugin or “tagging” application would have to be created. You can add Spotlight comments using the Automator under OS X, I wonder how hard it would be to create a custom task that autocompletes based on a tag library as you type?