Talking Point (4/11): Spotlight on Tiger, You Dig?

ScottW

ScottW

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A new feature here at MacOSX.com is our daily talking points. Each day we will feature a talking points to motivate quality interaction on hot topics for the Mac Community.

April 11 - In the upcoming version of Mac OS X (10.4) Tiger has a new search application called Spotlight. This rapid way of searching your computer could change the way you interface with your Mac.

Before Mac OS X, I used to sort all my applications by type (Graphics, Business, Games, etc) into folders. With OS X, I just put everything in the root Application s folder, mainly because some applications didn't properly update or upgrade if in sub-folders.

How do you see Spotlight changing the way you use your Mac? For those with experience using Spotlight, have you noticed a change in your approach?

That is today's talking point.
 
I don't see it changing my computer habits much, although I haven't used it yet. It seems like a very powerful search tool -- but my basic organization still comes from myself, not Spotlight.

I have three hard drives: a 40GB boot, a 60GB data/documents, and a 120GB media/music. They're organized sufficiently well, and I can find anything I need in a snap -- I also don't have a zillion documents cluttering my desktop. This works for me -- I know where everything is. I can access it faster than I can type Command-F and find it, and I'm sure this'll hold true for Spotlight -- althought I'd love to be proved wrong.

Some of my folders extend three and four levels deep, and if Spotlight is truly as fast as they claim, it may be slightly quicker to "bring up" the document in Spotlight rather than using four quick clicks of the mouse to access the file(s).

I'll have to wait and see, personally, but for those who are anally organized, Automator may be the "one killer feature" that we love about Tiger instead of Spotlight.
 
I see Spotlight making a difference to searching email (esp. with saved searches), but not so much to my use of the Finder. I'm more looking forward to Dashboard and multiple person iChat AV.

Kap
 
It means that I might not user Quicksilver anymore, basically... whcih is sad, because QuickSilver really is a magnificent piece of software.

It's like we've hit system 7.5 all over again, and all of the shareware apps are getting either bought or re-made by Apple.
 
I am hoping it will improve the speed and accuracy of Find By Content searches, enabling to search for a whole phrase, not just a single word, or even grep-like searches. This would aid my research enourmously.

Indeed, I use Quicksilver for much more than just launcing programs, so I don't think there will be a conflict there.
 
It will make a lot of my hacky-but-oh-so-neat Folder Actions workarounds a thing of the past. For example, I have a "web downloads" folder. Everything from Safari/Firefox/etc. goes in there. I then have a Folder Actions script I use to sort the incoming downloads by file type, as soon as they're done downloading. It shuffles off torrents to one folder, sgfs to another, and then there's a catch-all "Other" folder. It works quite well. But with Spotlight and Smart Folders, I won't need to mess around with any of that. I won't interact with my Web Downloads folder directly at all. I'll just have a few smart folders that dynamically display all files of a certain type that are within that folder.

I won't bother sorting my mp3 folder anymore, either. I'll let iTunes auto-organize it in its oh-so-annoying way (just to make it happy, and to make it easier to migrate back after a hard disk crash or something of that sort), and use Smart Folders to sort my mp3s in meaningful categories. Using this method, I'll have what I've long wanted: the ability to store a file in more than one folder WITHOUT having to manage hordes of aliases. If I delete the file, it will disappear from ALL the smart folders. If I change its name, I don't need to hunt down a dozen aliases and change their names, too. It'll be just like using iTunes (I have everything organized with Smart Playlists, using special tags I put in the Comments field if necessary), only in the Finder.

It will be much easier to manage all my XCode projects. Instead of dealing with a bunch of nested folders, I'll have a Smart Folder that displays my XCode files and my builds and nothing else, since those are the only files I frequently work with directly. Same goes for REALbasic projects, and even more for web site development.

I have a huge collection of desktop backgrounds. The problem is, it's so big that it's nearly impossible to sort and trim. My monitor size has grown more than once since I started my collection, so a lot of them need to go. It'll be nice to be able to do a FAST search by image size.

That's all that springs to mind immediately. There'd be a million more uses if I could add my own arbitrary tags to files, but AFAIK that's not a feature of Spotlight (more like what MS promised for Longhorn, or, in a less vapor-ware sense, what Google has done with Gmail).
 
Just a short note to those who still think Spotlight will replace QS and/or LaunchBar: It won't. Not in 10.4, anyway. I've got LaunchBar on Apple-Esc and Spotlight's search bar on Apple-(thekeybelowEsc). It's really easy for me now: LaunchBar is still MUCH quicker to find my applications, and Spotlight is for everything else. As a launcher, Spotlight is too slow. However as an information/file searcher, it's much better than QS or LB.

Where I actually use Spotlight:

- Finder search. It's just "better searching" there. Much better.

- Mail.app. The first thing I did was to create a smart mailbox that shows me 'unread' messages. That way, I can still have all mails filtered into separate boxes automatically by rules but have a one-stop point of access to new mails. Sadly, the icon _still_ only shows the number of new mails in the inbox. :/

- That's all for now. I don't really need Spotlight in SysPrefs. I think that's a rather good idea for new users, but I happen to know where I find things in SysPrefs. Thank you. Please, Apple, do not take Spotlight as an excuse to move around controls in SysPrefs to make us use Spotlight. ;)
 
i personally see the prospect of smart folders vastly tidying up my computer. instead of spending time keeping all my folders organised (they're pretty well filed at the mo), and cleaning up junk born through laziness or installs, i can set up smart folders for work, apps, docs, media etc. that would be powerful.
 
I haven't used Spotlight yet, so I really don't know how good it will be or how it may change the way I work. I'll speculate instead.

10.3's inline searching absolutely changed the way I work. That is so awesome. There's nothing like being close to where you want to be hierarchically, and then popping into inline search (command+option+F) to fine tune from there. Very efficient. I have to keep reminding my coworkers to use it instead of the standard Finder search. Old habits die hard.

So given how much inline searching has benefited me, I am optimistic that Spotlight will take that even further.

However, one thing I'm not sure about is how annoying superfluous search results will be. Presumably there's ways to filter out your searches right? For example, if I search on "my kickass document" and I know for a fact that the actual title of the document is "my kickass document", I really don't want to be bogged down with dozens of files that have the word "kickass" in them or "document", etc. Is there a mode to just return results for exactly what you type and not the metadata or "near" results?
 
Actually, Spotlight will take that a step _back_ in my opinion. Inline searching takes at least a step more and if you name a file 'trees.doc' and you search for 'trees', metadata search will make sure that 'trees.doc' isn't necessarily the top hit, since other documents might have more instances of the word 'trees' inside. That's getting on my nerves, currently, in Tiger. :/
 
Even worse. I just checked the feature again. Since Spotlight doesn't currently support InDesign files (or rather, there isn't an Adobe file type thingie, erh, plugin for Spotlight just yet), I find all the PDFs created from my InDesign files, but the files I'm really _looking_ for (i.e. the work-files, i.e. InDesign files) are only found by name and are BELOW all the JPEGs and PDFs and whatever else Spotlight happens to find in a particular folder. :/
 
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