spot , which was introduced with OS X 10.4 , is Apple ’s solution to aid us find stuff on our more and more - big severe drives . limelight ’s goal is to make certain we never lose something again — as long as we can remember something about a file cabinet , image , software program , or other item , we can find out it .
How it works
limelight helps you traverse down things by indexing everything on your hard drive — include the name and contentedness of pretty much everything you store . Using this index , it ’s then theoretically possible to determine documents promptly and easily by only type a word , phrase , or keyword that you recall from the item to be plant . As some of you may recall , I have some issue with the current execution of Spotlight , so I was glad to see that an enhanced version of the search putz is on hydrant for OS X 10.5 .
Spotlight in Leopard appears to work much as it does in 10.4 — just press Command - Space and start typing . However , the carrying out has been changed , with some new features as well as change to existing one . These addition and sweetening are designed to make work with public eye easier , giving the user more great power . Hopefully , they ’ll address many of the issues Spotlight critic like myself have with the current implementation .
What’s changed
One crowing modification in Leopard ’s take on Spotlight is that app launching is now believe a more authoritative undertaking than it was in Tiger . Applications are the first matches returned from a Spotlight lookup , and if the top come to is the program you want to launch , there ’s no need to select it — it ’s already highlighted , ask just a mechanical press of the Return button to launch it . I still do n’t think catapult apps such as QuickSilver , Butler , and LaunchBar have much to occupy about , though , as their feature set go well beyond that offered by Spotlight .
Another change is that when you work up the Spotlight windowpane ( Command - Option - Space by default ) , the results list is pre - populated with recently - used item . So if you occur to be appear for something that ’s been recently used , you wo n’t even have to run a hunting .
Finally , more Finder - like lookup features are make into the glare search window ; there ’s no longer such a braggart disparity between the types of search you run in the Finder and those you run in a Spotlight window . I think this is a good theme ; I find myself frustrated by having to remember to utilize the Finder lookup when I want more option than I have in the Spotlight search windowpane .
What’s new
One of the biggest fresh feature is the ability to seek web Macs and OS X Server boxes . Many Mac owners have more than one machine , and now , you ’ll be able to rule material on any of those networked Macs with one Spotlight hunt .
Also Modern , and a most welcome addition , is Quick Look , which shows you preview of your PDFs , photos , contacts , and slideshows ( and probably more ) without even opening the parent practical software . Just select the detail in Spotlight ’s results tilt , and you ’ll see the Quick Look preview . No more finding what you think is the right moving-picture show , only to see you were wrong after waiting for Photoshop to plunge and start the mental image .
Finally , Apple address an item near the top of my Spotlight gripe list with the addition of more brawny search logical system to the Spotlight user interface . public eye now supports boolean system of logic — you could use “ AND , ” “ OR , ” and “ NOT ” in your search requests . This should greatly cut off down on the number of irrelevant matches detect . you could also search using specific Indian file attributes , such as author , eccentric , or keyword , for example . It ’s not clear at this detail if you may also use parentheses to control the pigeonholing of your search elements or not .
Who’s it for
spot is for anyone who uses OS X. This is specially true given its prevalence not only in the system , but also in many applications such as Mail . spot is the search applied science for OS X substance abuser .
What’s missing
One thing that was n’t cross in last week ’s keynote is whether or not Spotlight will in the end support phrase searches — I’d really like to be able to search on “ some musical phrase , ” thereby exclude any text file that simply contains both “ some ” and “ phrase ” ( but not in order ) from my lookup results . This seems like something many people would need to do , but it ’s not clear if Leopard will add this feature or not .
It ’s also obscure if Finder searches for computer filename have sustain any easier — prior to Tiger , searching by computer file name was riotous and easy . And although Spotlight is a great technology and incredibly powerful , it actually made it elusive to do a dim-witted filename hunting in the Finder .
What it means
public eye in Leopard seems to be gaining at least some of the miss features people have been clamour for since Tiger ’s 2005 release . Apple seems to clear that if Spotlight is the future of search on OS X , then it want to make the tool more useful to more of the exploiter al-Qa’ida . I believe I ’ll find myself liking the OS X 10.5 version of Spotlight much more than I like the current implementation , but we ’ll have to look for the prescribed vent to see how all of these advance in reality wreak out .
