Dear Apple, I need an iLibrary

[symphonix]

Haha, Ora, I saw an interview with an Australian scientist who won an Ig-Nobel prize for research into belly button lint. He said that shortly after winning the prize he was inundated with job offers and offers of research grants. He pretty soon worked out that most of them had mistakenly thought he'd won the Nobel prize. :-)

[ora]

qwikstreet: figured you understood but couldn't resist the ex-scientist joke: i have a pretty cheesy sense of humor!

symphonix: That is hilarious, was at ibm labs in zurich a week or two ago, where they won two nobels in consecutive years, can just picture them poking around in some portly gentleman's belly button in search of another (ig)nobel. Also, to show how silly research can get, a guy did a phd on why all teapots drip, and how it was an insurmountable problem. Two week slater a housewife came up with te world's first dripless teapot! Not only a silly phd, but wrong too, he should get two ignobels.

Back on topic- mi5moav- yes xan-edu looks interesting but limited to courses, and the problems really happened for me with dissertations.

Cat: bibdesk looks interesting, and i have messed about with latex/Texshop a bit, sadly my MSc dissertation is due in in a month, so i don't really have time to learn all the functions, i really should have got into it earlier given how many acadmic/science people seem to like it.
I hadn't really clocked the preview search either, in fact i was still using the achingly slow acrobat reader for a while after i upgraded to panther cos the jaguar version of preview was always so slow. The newer version is excellent, though still missing the column select tool (unless i'm being blind) that i generally needed for lifting quotes/citations from academic papers.

In general, i really like the idea of an iLibrary, allowing meta data and searches. Content searches are excellent, but i have so much data on my machine i rarely get round to indexing it. What would be nice in an iLibrary is that you'd only really put files with heavy text-content in it, so indexing your iLibrary-library would be more of a possibility, maybe even automatic?

Mi5moav's speculations aside (no offense, but i've read other posts of yours, and while i hope you are right i'm not going to bet any money on it ) I really hope Apple pursue this project, a lot of the work must have already been done for iTunes, so i can't imagine it would be too difficult.