Last week Sté­fan Sin­clair noted that his upgrade to Leo­pard had largely been a less datadetect.pngthan awe-inspiring exper­i­ence. he did find some amuse­ment with the new Mosaic screensaver and I will admit that after try­ing it on his instig­a­tion, it’s pretty cool. I have to add another rather impress­ive addi­tion to the list. Dat­a­De­tect­ors! Wow. I can remem­ber being one among many that saw the power of this sort of recog­ni­tion of dis­join­ted info on the New­ton and hav­ing it take a scribble about lunch with Joe and make some assump­tions and cre­ate an event in your cal­en­dar linked to the first Joe it found in your address book. So, Apple’s been play­ing with the tech­no­logy for awhile. Dat­a­De­tect­ors are so subtle that I sus­pect many people might be miss­ing them. I did. Then the other day, I happened to note the little rect­angle form itself around a date and time with a little arrow. I remem­ber that Steve Jobs had men­tioned this dur­ing a key­note at some point. I clicked the arrow and asked Mail.app to cre­ate a new iCal event. Col­our me impressed. It cre­ated an event at the exact right time and date figured out that the data adja­cent to place: was what it was and pop­u­lated that field and even caught the topic of the present­a­tion mak­ing that the event title. It really worked. Ima­gine my amazement. No ‘freckled eggs’ ;-) I will have to tpy with this a little fur­ther and see how well it works with info not so nicely format­ted, but so far…very impressed. I know that MailTags are much more power­ful, but I am impressed with the sim­pli­city of DD.
I am a big fan of integ­ra­tion of tools such as email and cal­en­dar and address book. Out­look does do a fine job with this under Win­dows, but Apple has taken a dif­fer­ent tack by wir­ing these things at a deeper layer of the OS. The­or­et­ic­ally this should allow use to choose favoured apps and thus have greater free­dom to work the way that we want to work. I like this.