At GUADEC, Keith Packard pointed me to a pretty nice piece of software: Dirvish which snapshots your system every time you run it.
The nice bit is that you can browse your system at any point in time, from the site:
With dirvish you can maintain a set of complete images of your filesystems with unattended creation and expiration. A dirvish backup vault is like a time machine for your data.
Seems like Apple today announced a GUI for a similar system. They also announced thumbnails for document searches, very much in the spirit of Beagle.
A little archaeological story is that Beagle was one of those technologies in which open source beat everyone else to the release.
We developed Beagle in the open, and talked about it (and its predecessor Dashboard) for months before Spotlight was announced. In fact, Beagle was demonstrated and announced on the same day that Apple's Dashboard was, a few hours in advance at the GUADEC 2004 conference in Norway.
The press coverage of GUADEC vs Apple was a little bit different though :-).
Posted on 07 Aug 2006