whoops, forgot about spotlight. i stopped working on my newsreader before it became viable.

i've examined the spotlight apis from time to time, and it does look like it solves a lot of the same problems. having never really used it, i can't say if it does as good of a job as bfs indexes do or not.

i can say that the beos file system is much more amenable to database-like usage than the mac file system. bfs has indexes implemented as a first-class feature, just as important as filenames or metadata. indexes are managed by the file system itself. spotlight was kind of bolted on top of hfs+. its indexes are in user-level files.