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There are many variants of the Smart Folder concept that can be seen in any application that uses the Spotlight engine. No matter the application a Smart Folder can be identified by a gear symbol on its purple-hued icon. Some of these variants are:

Before Spotlight earlier versions of Mac OS X had a similar concept in the iApps (iTunes and iPhoto), but these did not use the system-wide Spotlight engine.

The Smart Folder concept has existed for many years prior to Apple's Mac OS X. For example:
  • In 1991, "Magnets," a utility for Macintoshes, permitted users to place "magnets," files describing search criteria, into any existing folder. The magnets would then "attract" files matching those criteria (i.e. aliases to files matching those criteria would automatically be created with the folders).

  • In 1988, Lotus introduced Lotus Agenda , the first Personal Information Manager, that had a similar facility allowing users to define "categories," its equivalent of folders, that would automatically gather references to "items," its equivalent of files, that matched sets of criteria specified by the user.