Yup.<p>MacOS does an OK job of helping the user find things with Spotlight, but it&#x27;s not a full metadata system like BFS had.<p>Mail.app, for example, keeps each message in a separate file[0] (and probably has a cache or separate database of this to make displaying mailboxes quicker).  This makes it easy for Spotlight to index, but all of the stuff that you&#x27;d think of as metadata is actually just regular data inside the .emlx file.<p>If Apple made a huge effort to start treating the metadata (assuming the infrastructure described in the Ars Technica article still exists) as a first class citizen and using it like BeOS did, maybe we can get there.  This would be a drastic rethink though.  It feels like files, in some ways, are becoming second-class citizens in the Mac world.  Photos, for example, are managed in the Photos app - you do not go into the filesystem and organize your photos.<p>One big problem with filesystem metadata is how do you transfer it?  The Ars article showed a sidecar file (._filename) being created when the file was copied to a non-HFS volume.  Now the metadata is detached from the file and we&#x27;re back to the same problem.<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mike.laiosa.org&#x2F;2009&#x2F;03&#x2F;01&#x2F;emlx.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mike.laiosa.org&#x2F;2009&#x2F;03&#x2F;01&#x2F;emlx.html</a>