![]() Its interface was unlike any other window if anything, it seemed like something out of a Web browser, or a Windows machine. It belonged to no application it just hung there mysteriously on your computer, refusing to come to the front when you cycled through your windows or your applications. The Spotlight window was annoying in every conceivable way.To see all the results, you had to open the Spotlight window. The Spotlight menu didn’t act like a real menu, it often froze up as you were typing your search, and it displayed only a limited number of results.There were three such interfaces: the Spotlight menu, the Spotlight window, and the Finder search window. Worst of all, however, was the interface through which you actually performed a search and viewed your found results. The indexing would mysteriously stop working, and would have to be restarted using the Terminal command line. Files of certain types were not found properly I experienced this particularly with some font files, and Apple confirmed that this was a bug (perhaps caused by the distinction between a file’s visible name and its “display name,” which was sometimes a weird string to which the Some areas of the hard drive were excluded from the index, so files in those places couldn’t be found, even by name this exclusion was hard-coded into Spotlight (it wasn’t a preference the user could access), so there was no way even of learning what the problematic places were. ![]() Some features didn’t work for example, there was an option to search for invisible files, but no invisible files were ever found. Right from the beginning, however, there was trouble. Small wonder that Glenn’s article introducing Spotlight to our readers was so hopeful (“ Spotlight on Spotlight“, ). Spotlight, on the other hand, once its initial index was built, wouldĪlways be up to date, because every time you made any change to the hard disk, Spotlight would be notified right then and would modify the index accordingly. ON Location had to build its index, and to keep the index up to date, it had to rebuild it periodically. ![]() Well, Spotlight promised to bring that kind of technology to Mac OS X, only even better. ![]() What’s more, it used third-party translators to look inside your files (regardless of their format), read their content, and index that as well, so you could do a fast search for a file based on some words used inside the file. It generated an index of the names of your files, so searching for a file by its name was very fast. The old-style Finder Find involves searching through the hard disk, file by file and folder by folder, so it’s slow and besides, it requires that you know, with a fair degree of correctness, the name of the item you’re looking for, which is often exactly what you do not know.īack in the old System 7 days, on the other hand, a lot of us were crazy about a wonderful utility called ON Location, from ON Technology. Finding things on your hard disk(s) has always been hard – my mother can’t find a newly created Word document five seconds after she’s saved it – and now that your hard disk is really big and you’ve got lots of files, it’s getting harder. Tiger Spotlight: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly - When Spotlight was introduced in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, it was touted as a major improvement for users, and it’s not hard to see why. If you already know that, or if your teeth can’t handle any gnashing, you might want to skip this next section, where I recount a bit of regrettable history. In order to explain why Spotlight in Leopard is so good, I have to talk briefly about why Spotlight in Tiger was so bad. (The best way to reference that coverage is from our “ Leopard Arrives” series.) In this article, I want to tell you about what I think is the last big piece of the Leopard improvement puzzle – the all-new, all-singing, all-dancing Spotlight. I wrote an article about Spaces, Glenn Fleishman explained how File Sharing is light years better than it used to be, and Joe Kissell gave us the low-down on Time Machine. In earlier articles, we’ve talked about some of the great new features of Leopard that might make an upgrade worthwhile. #1615: Why Stage Manager needs an M1 iPad, Limit IP Address Tracking problems, Citibank cryptocurrency confusion.#1616: Explaining passkeys, Apple challenges for senior citizens, macOS 11.6.7 Big Sur fixes email attachment bug.#1617: Pages regains mail merge, HomeKit sensor improvements, keyboard flags in Monterey.Preview selections, portable power for a MacBook Pro #1618: M2 MacBook Air available to order, Lockdown Mode, Live Text vs.#1619: Stage Manager first impressions, Live Text in Preview redux, SMS 2FA failure fix, moving large folders with ChronoSync.
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