The thing is, Bill, with respect, what you may do is not the same as what we may want (or indeed need) to do. Things would be much easier for an evangelist if users’ requirements were invariably a subset of his own; but 'tis not always so…
Yes, archiving files rather than indexing them is undoubtedly safer. But it won’t always do. It’s fine for archived material which isn’t going to change. But for material which is “live”, and which IS going to change, archiving is unsatisfactory. Anything produced in a foreign format (that is, not RTF or TXT) is going to be modified externally. I am working in Pages at the moment. For very good reasons, my files for this project are indexed in DT Pro. For equally good reasons, many of those files are “live”. Here’s what happens:
- I index a file in DT
- I work on that file in Pages. (Doesn’t matter whether I open it from Pages or from DT, of course).
- I save my changes.
- QuickLook will preview the file, complete with changes, in DT; but…
- DT knows nothing about those changes until I sync the changed file.
“Okay” you may say, “so sync the file, then.”
Not as easy as it looks. I have to remember every file I changed, select each one (if they are not contiguous/in a DT folder) and run File>Synchronize. I might easily miss something; or, long after the event, go looking for something and run straight into the I-Know-It’s-In-Here-But-I-Can’t-Find-It problem.
A number of things could make this easier.
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A command which finds all files/folders which have changed since their last sync date and synchronizes them.
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A smart folder which will find those files. (Kind = Indexed File/Folder, perhaps)
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A background version of (1) applicable on a file-by-file basis, for people who don’t want background sync all the time (version control lashups, for example).
While we’re at it, how about another command which says “Okay, I’ve done with this file now, archive a copy and delete the indexed-file link” – because it’s usually once a project has ended that we move our files to an Archive folder or throw them away for good.
And, still while we’re at it, how about
(1) Finder-style file links which can track a file even if it’s moved
(2) An “import-and-delete-original” command or CM.
The thing is, Indexing isn’t properly up to the job. It’s a one-time, unidirectional process that has to be manually updated but doesn’t offer a convenient toolset for doing so.
But indexing isn’t the poor relation to archiving. It’s a different method for different circumstances, and could do with some attention. Conceptually, what’s required is very straightforward. I can’t comment on the actual code-level work it would take, of course.
If I could sum up the single tool which would make Indexing really useful, it would simply be: Automatic background sync.