Ok. 3 Things... 1) Spotlight Indexing of Virtual Machines 2) Automator Actions 3) AppleScript Support Thanks
I don't see how they can ever do #1, and if you mean #2 and #3 inside the guest OS, ditto. The functionality for these would have to be supported by the guest OS.
Should be possible... as the Virtual Machine's hard disks are merely .dmg images!!! I think a plug-in to Spotlight could be made that only searched the .dmg images of Parallels Virtual Machines, so that you didn't get info from other non-vitrual machine .DMG images in the results... ?
Given that this is a Mac program for allowing Windows programs to run on a Mac, perhaps it would be best for most people if they concentrate on that. Most people are only going to have one VM, so the ability to determine which DMG had the data is probably not that useful. Michael
Ah, sorry... maybe you misunderstood what I was getting at. Let's say that you could use Spotlight to search a single VM DMG... let's say that you had a work email program that was not replicated on your OS X machine... I could foresee a really useful ability to search the DMG for content inside the emails just as we Mac users currently search for data in Spotlight in our emails... For instance... (not sure if you are a Mac user or not)... in Spotlight today... I can enter ftp.richardhunter.com, hit enter, and up will pop an item which is an email I received months ago with my new Server settings... What if I'm interested in searching for something from OS X that might be imbedded like that inside Windows! If I can't limit it to the DMG's that are associated with Parallels (could look in a hundred other .dmg files from downloaded software stored in my OS X Downloads folder)... it might find information on the OS X drive, and be more difficult to navigate to! Clearer?
Still sounds impossible. Not only is the windows install inside a dmg, everything IN THERE is in its own file formats. Spotlight would have to know about those and have hooks into those apps/files for it to work. My understanding of spotlight technology is that programmers enable it in their programs. Obviously the finder has spotlight built in, so files sitting in the file system outside of specific programs can be searched. But other programs have to make their data available to spotlight, if I understand how spotlight works correctly. Unless Apple or Microsoft and all the windows 3rd party apps writers release importers to allow spotlight to search their products, it won't happen. I don't think this is possible with spotlight given how it works (based on my possibly incorrect understanding of how spotlight works, I should say).
You are correct re: proprietary formats... however, standard email (NOT OUTLOOK), .PDF files, Text Files, Rich Text, HTML Files, any standards-based documents that are cross-platform compatible would work! If it is proprietary, though, would most likely need a special plug-in...
Wouldn't it be easier just to place those "standards-based documents that are cross-platform compatible" outside of your virtual machine. Then Spotlight could see them without any problem. If you placed them in a shared directory, then both computers could see them. Michael
Hi Richard, I think that what you desire is quite sensible, however I think that to enable such a feature in a way that doesn't really severly impact the performance of spotlight and your machine, would be difficult. Spotlight has all sorts of interesting metadata importers that would presumably work just as well with files from a Windows volume, however my understanding of how spotlight works is that it caches information on the volume being indexed. I don't think that spotlight has the ability to index .dmg volumes at all, and assume that if it did it would require that the .dmg be mounted. I'm new to Spotlight and even new to the Mac, so maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I think that what several people have tried to convey is that from the perspective of a few people (myself included) who write software for a living, it smells like something that would require fundamental changes to how things work, rather than just adding something additional. We can all dream, however. Neil
Hmmph. Spotlight's plenty fast on my machine, and all the XP desktop searches have their annoyances. Certainly google's is the best for the PC, but it's far from perfect. Besides, the point was the wish to integrate search results for stuff inside the VM within search results for stuff within OS X. Two totally different use cases. I still maintain it's not possible without someone doing serious work on the windows side, and even then I'm still not sure it's possible between a host OS and a VM.
This is pretty low on my priority list, but if it is implemented, it should be optional so as not to waste processor resources for those who don't want it, and to provide isolation between the virtual environment and the host. This could possibly be a security problem since it would be a path between the two environments.
Yeah, personally I don't see a pressing need for it and even if the work to make it possible were achieved on both platforms, I don't think the headaches are worth it. I'm still not convinced it's possible in a seamless manner at all.
