The cool thing comes with the GUI. It tries to make search more natural, meaning also, more eye-candy. It still has to improve lots of things, but as a good step I think they made it pretty well. It's not that I like the Live search engine (in fact I just see it as a poor competition to Google, unfortunately), but the approach this project has taken. It makes it easier and prettier to look for things. For example, depending on what you are looking for, it displays the results in different manners:
- If you look for "news" the results will appear as if they were in a newspaper.
- General web searches appear with a different clear to read representation.
- Images are displayed iPhoto like
....

Also, you have what have been called "shelves" where you can group your search with little preview thumnails and maintain them organized, as easy as drag & dropping.

One bad point is it finally leads you to the usual Live search engine in some cases as when you pick an image to see.

As I said, it pretty a first step (it's in Beta phase right now), but I think it could be a good approach to a more meaningful and powerful search.

All of this uses the .Net based Silverlight techonology, which we have available in Linux thanks to Moonlight, so it's kind of accessible "everywhere".
Hope Google will do something like this, if they're not actually working on it, you never know with them. For sure they'll make it in an AJAX fashion, if they can (which may be true, as true is it would be far more complicated), but they also wouldn't depend on a plug-in (specially Microsoft, even though Mono is there). Well... just speculations.

Resuming, I see this as a good research software. We'll see if it leads to something mature.

So easy you won't have to think. In fact, you won't even have to realize their mistakes.

The other day I decided to let iTunes organize all my music which I have on a hard drive shared through my home's LAN. After almost a day doing its thing (I got a LOT of music) I could finally see the iTunes library filled with my music. "This is the thing" (I thought), "now I'm gonna beat it sorting all this stuff finally". But... wow! iTunes says it has a number of songs there which is in fact a lower number than the one I saw when I started the process with my shared hard drive. Almost 100 songs are gone! Why?
Well, I thought, those might be some songs in the f******* WMA (Windows Media Audio) format. I knew that was shit... but hey! I only had 7 songs in WMA! What's up then?
Don't know. And until now I haven't been able to discover what's wrong. I asked on forums, looked carefully the songs' names to see if iTunes had trouble with them, etc... No clue.
I just don't know also how to get which songs are missing... I think I will have to finally do some easy script in Bash (Linux) to see that.

I don't know what happened after this research, but what's worse... I wasn't even notified something had happened. Why? Why didn't iTunes just said "Huh, I had trouble with these"? I don't know, and in fact I'm not even interested anymore.
With free software you always get an "easily" traceable error. If you don't understand it, Ok, don't do anything about it, but there may be someone out there who does. At least, you're notified and you can do something about it. But what about this? I'm sure if I invested some more time I could get some information and gather why all this happened, but as I said, I'm not even interested. They didn't report anything and I have to give my time to correct something for Apple? If I'm gonna give my time working on something I'll do it for just to reasons:
1. Money
2. Personal satisfaction.
The first I won't easily get with neither iTunes or other FLOSS software, but the second is a totally different thing. If I'm gonna do something not for money, let's do it with/for people who really cares about you also.

Some would say... "If you don't like it, just don't use it", and they're right, that's what I'm gonna do. But I guess what would have it been with my literature passionate sister in this situation... She wouldn't even have noticed or, if so, she probably would have resigned to lose those songs... The other option would have been "Brother!!! What's up with this? I don't know what's happening, you got to fix it". Lovely...

Long post, boring post... I just had to tell it. Apple makes things easy, you know, always you don't try to see a little bit further.

Quote of the day: "I try not to predict the future. I'm not a big believer in fortune telling. The best way to predict the future is to implement it." - David Heinemeier Hansson