Shortly after Apple’s WWDC, I commented that the new Spotlight feature might qualify as a LaunchBar killer.

Well, John Gruber is privy to some inside information, and in Spotlight on Spotlight, he gets into some more detail about how Spotlight is going to work.

One key factor is that Spotlight indexes and returns files, very specifically. So much though that Mail.app will switch to a format which stores each mail message in a single file to make it more indexable by Spotlight. I think I confused the incremental search nature of Spotlight and the fact that the demo referred to PreferencePanes with the more general functionality of LaunchBar. Several of the things which LaunchBar indexes have nothing to do with files (like AddressBook entries, Safari bookmarks and history, etc) and also, of course, LaunchBar doesn’t index file contents. It sort of seems to with MP3s, but I’m pretty sure its source for this is actually the iTunes Music Library, not the individual files.

No matter, the point is that the two things are different, and that Apple aficionados may be interested to read more about Spotlight on Daring Fireball.

As an aside, I noted the release of a new beta of QuickSilver this week, I downloaded it briefly, but couldn’t find my way to the web search templates, and since those are by far my favorite feature of LaunchBar 4, I didn’t spend long seeing if it would sway me away. I finally found information about how to configure them, but since LB4 is free while it’s in beta, I have no great motivation to switch. I’ve been happy enough with LaunchBar that I’ll probably upgrade/extend/renew my license when they finally cut the full release — but they must definitely feel a lot of pressure considering that QuickSilver is free and it hits at exactly the same use model.