Simon Fell > Its just code > Spotlight

One of the first Salesforce.com integrations I wanted to do on the Mac was to plug-in to Spotlight. However the official way to extend Spotlight, it to add your own metadata importers, however this basically requires you to have files on the local filesystem, there's no way to plug-in into the actual query runtime and run additional queries against external data sources. (I wonder if this is planned for Leopord or not?). So, for the Salesforce.com integration, this would mean pulling down all the data you wanted spotlight to index down to the Mac, certainly doable, but smacks of using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Someone on the Idea Exchange mentioned a Google Importer, which adds Google searches to Spotlight, but as far as i can tell, it does it by using an InputManager hack to inject itself into the spotlight UI, sounds like you'd end up spending all your time fixing it up as the internal details of Spotlight changed.