Search facilities have long been one of the Mac OS’ strengths, I recall being impressed by my first Mac’s almost instantaneous find facility. And apple continued to improve it on OS X when things started getting messier on people’s hard drives as from 100’s of megabytes we’re now dealing with 100’s of Gigabytes of stored data to sift through. Up until 10.3 (panther) we had the good ol’ find utility. Come 10.4 Tiger and now we have spotlight. A feature so good, Microsoft got out their photocopiers for (according to Steve Jobs at least) and made system wide search a priority for Vista.

Now Spotlight is great in theory. Hit a hotkey or click in the corner and bang it starts searching everything it has indexed including e-mails as well as within files such as MS Word files and PDFs. This is an excellent tool and when spotlight’s API is used by applications its benefits are enormous - ever used the spotlight tool in help or in standard fonts requester? If only my design applications would adopt it - can see it being useful to find a particular layer in Fireworks or Photoshop for example or a file within Dreamweaver’s files panel.

However its standard OS implementation could be refined. Firstly it lacks app launching features which will be introduced in Leopard and will be a case of Apple getting THEIR photocopiers out as they rip off Quicksilver. Secondly there’s no easy way to tell it to search a particular volume or folder or to limit itself for a particular search. In fact the searchbar in open finder windows is more useful. One huge limit I find with spotlight is the way it starts search as soon as you give it the minimal of criteria. You type a single letter in spotlight and bam it starts searching. You want to filter results in a search window. Select the filetype and set it to say image and again bam! It starts searching. All I’d like is for it to let me set all my parameters before starting a search because I know I’m looking for an image and I know that the filename starts with say “lost” why should I waste seconds waiting for my machine as it starts listing all the images on my machine then those that start with l then lo then los then finally lost. Start the search when I hit return you fool. I pity thee. Aherm.

Enter Spotlaser. Whereas Quicksilver is invaluable for finding apps and folders, spotlight is great for tracking down the a file or email that I only recall having a particular phrase in it… Spotlaser brings a rather large but useful interface to spotlight and concentrates on what 95% of all searches are all about : finding a file! Download it. Install it. And rediscover how quick finding a file is on a Mac. A few faults are perhaps the interface is a bit bulky - I’d like some sort of Quicksilver plugin perhaps. Also I’d like an easily editable filter system. Currently it’s limited to the main file categories. In spotlight I can specify from a long list of esoteric filetypes _ I often search for d.mg files. Would love to be able to specify that. BTW why does that filetype list take forever to show? Is it created dynamically according to the content you have on your machine or is it predefined? Who knows… Anyways Spotlaser will definitely be put through its paces and the best thing is… it’s free to download (but is donationware).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 at 1:18 pm and is filed under Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.