Posted 24 November 2005 - 08:30 PM
Rob, I agree with your column completely and I hope more pressure is brought to bear on Apple to improve Spotlight BEFORE Leopard, which is still a year away. I was looking forward to Spotlight, based on Apple's claims of being able to "Find anything, anywhere, fast." We know that was a lie now that Apple has changed that phrase on their web site to say "Find Anything, Fast." Of course, the rest of it is a lie, too, since Spotlight is slow (though it did improve somewhat six months later with 10.4.3) and it does not find "anything."
I noticed how 10.4's Find was worse than 10.3's within the first day of use. When Safari loads a QuickTime movie, it creates an invisible file in the system. So I used to run a search with the following parameters: Location=Entire Volume, Invisibility=visible or invisible, Size is greater than 5000KB, and Date Created is today. When I ran that search in Tiger, it took 2 minutes and gave me zero results. Yet when I connected to my Tiger machine over the network and ran the same search with Panther, I got 18 results in a matter of seconds. WTF?! I then noticed that the latest created file had an extension of qtch, so I ran a search in Tiger for all files with extension qtch and got zero results. I then navigate to the location of the file with extension qtch and type qtch into the search box of that Finder window: zero results. Hey tallscot, if Spotlight can do so much more, then why does it find so much less and take so much longer?
Not including the pathname at the bottom of the Spotlight search results window is just ridiculous. Even though Safari's status bar is turned off, you still have the option to turn it on; not so with the Spotlight search results window. And in the Find File results window, the pathname area is too small, so it's usually difficult to actually read. You could resize the 10.3 window to see the full pathname. In addition, you can no longer sort by Parent, which was the 2nd column of 10.3's search results.
You can sort the Spotlight search results window by "Date," but it actually means Date Opened, not Date Modified, which is usually the far more relevant information and has never before been used on the Mac as a means by which to sort (thus how should we assume Date does NOT mean Date Modified).
Most egregious of all is that 10.4 actually removed one of the major benefits of pre-10.4, active file searching in an open Finder window. If I have a folder full of html documents open and I want to quickly find the one named "events_temporary" I could previously type in the word temporary and immediately the window would only show files with the word temporary in the filename. Now it will show me every folder, image, pdf and html file in both that directory and every subdirectory that contains the word temporary anywhere within the content. Half the time it won't even limit itself to the directory that is open. I just navigated to ~/Library and typed itunes into the search box. The location that it chose to search was Home. I now have to click the Library button to change the search to where I originally intended it to be in the first place.
Another discrepancy is that sometimes it considers files documents and other times it doesn't. For instance, if I type Bulletein into the Spotlight menu box, it will show a Microsoft Word document called Winter 2006 Bulletein in the results under the Documents heading. However, if I type Bulletein kind:documents it says no results found. I have the same problem with InDesign files. If I don't limit the search to any filetype, it lists InDesign documents under the documents heading. But if I specify only documents to show, it will not show InDesign documents.
Then they had to ruin System Preferences by putting a Spotlight search box in the toolbar, which you cannot remove, and forcing the cursor to be there by default. You can't even tab out of it unless you enable full keyboard access, which I don't need or want.
I can understand why Spotlight doesn't search Entourage mail, but Stickies? Come on, that's an Apple app! Why no searching of Stickies?
Spotlight is good at finding groups of files. For instance, if you want to get a thumbnails-look at all the images on a CD relating to Thanksgiving. But if you're looking for actual specific files based on filename or location, it's much, much more difficult.
Sign In
Register
Help
MultiQuote
