Chapter 16. Spotlight

Before our excursion into Core Data, there was not much worth sharing about Linear’s data files. You may remember that when we laid out the data file type, I skipped the uniform type indicator (UTI) declaration, saying, “Our application . . . will be using a file format that nobody else is expected to read; we can leave [UTI] blank.”

The expansion of Linear’s data files to encompass data sources has changed this. Think only of the query “every file sourced from the Economic Report of the President,” and you can see that Linear data files are now a natural for indexing in the Spotlight metadata system.

How Data Gets into Spotlight

Metadata is information that isn’t necessarily in a file but is about the file. All file systems ...

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