Similar to how the primary feature of Leopard has been Time Machine, the primary feature of Tiger was Spotlight. You could say that Spotlight was the spotlight feature of Tiger. However, it turned out to not be as revolutionary as was promised. It was slow, the prioritizing of files seemed weird to many people, and it didn’t accept various advanced searches that power users may have been used to on platforms such as Google. Well, Leopard brings along some improvements to Spotlight, but are they enough for me to start really using it? Or do some of the “enhancements” actually make it seem not quite as good as before?

One thing that has changed is that the dedicated Spotlight window is gone. Remember how when you did a Spotlight search from the menu bar, and you hit the Show All item, it would pop up a special Spotlight window which let you see all of your items from within any application and easily refine them? That’s gone in Leopard. The Show All menu item doesn’t even list how many there are in total any more, and when you select it, your search opens in Finder. This makes absolutely no sense. In Tiger, the Spotlight window gave you all the things on your computer, divided up into categories, so that you could see your files, your folders, your images, your presentations, your movies, your audio, all completely separated into different sections by blue headers. Each blue header would show you the top 5, and clicking the “Show All” link on each header fully expanded the list. What’s totally idiotic strange about opening the Show All in the Finder is that the Finder gives you files. That’s it. Tiger’s “divide everything into categories by type” idea is gone. This is even stranger considering that the Spotlight menu divides things up by type, but the Spotlight Finder window doesn’t allow you to do this anymore.

Another thing that seems to have been messed up with the Spotlight window is that Finder no longer seems to let you have separate view defaults for searches like it did before. As I’ve said, I would personally much prefer to have the very nice Spotlight-style view for my searches, but otherwise, I’d like list view for my searches. However, I still want to have icon view for regular browsing through the Finder. But no, because I use icon view in the Finder, the Spotlight window in Finder gives me icon view, and if I switch to list view, then suddenly all of my Finder windows give me list view.

By the way, Apple’s website says that you can now use Spotlight to search system files, which is totally untrue. I can search for a file that I know for a fact is an existing system file, and Spotlight can’t find it. There’s no setting anywhere for searching system files, so let’s totally eradicate that lie right there.

Now, Apple can be credited with making some nice changes to Spotlight in Leopard. Spotlight does now support the Boolean logic and other nice Advanced Search features, the same that pro searchers have come to know and love on Google. I tried some fancy searches and they worked correctly without any apparent slowdown to speed. Spotlight in Leopard does seem to be a bit faster at searching, although it hasn’t gotten to the speed of light yet. Spotlight also adds to its search repertoire your Safari web history, dictionary definitions, and even calculations built in, so you don’t even have to launch Calculator. (Although if you want to after you do your calculation in Spotlight, just hit return and up Calculator will come.)

Apple is also trying to make Spotlight a bit more like various application launching programs. While Spotlight is certainly no replacement for Quicksilver. The default selection in the menu is now the Top Hit, so if you type in an application name, the app will show up as the Top Hit; just hit return to launch the app. The downside to this is for that those of us who liked being able to hit Show All quickly, that convenience is gone. (Personally, Quicksilver is my app launcher, and I don’t need to have Spotlight duplicate this functionality for me.) Granted, some people will love this ability, but if only Apple would offer a setting for what the default selection should be…

Another change in Spotlight is that you can now tell Spotlight (within the Spotlight Finder window) to just search by filename. Apple originally designed Spotlight to be like Google and find any file that had anything to do with your query, but for the majority of us who have a pretty good idea of what we named our own files, but we just need to find out where they are, searching by filename not only refines and speeds up Spotlight search results, but it lists the results in what I consider to be a relevance list that makes a lot more sense.

And, finally, Leopard lets you search across shared Macs, which is fine, except that when you hook a shared Mac up to your computer, Spotlight then uses up system resources to index that shared Mac, whether you want to search on it or not. Granted, for those of us who want to do Spotlight searching on shared Macs, that’s great, but if someone like me doesn’t care about Spotlighting shared computers, then shouldn’t I be able to tell Spotlight NOT to index it?

A few months ago, on his blog, Merlin Mann wrote that Spotlight “is a piece of crap, but it’s our piece of crap.” Apple has made a few improvements to Spotlight, but they’ve also changed a number of things that, in my opinion, make it even LESS useful than it was in Tiger, and indeed make me even less inclined to use it. One thing that Spotlight really needs is some more user-configurable preferences, something that I’ve rallied for in a number of places in Leopard. Apple may prefer to have Spotlight open in Finder, or to have the default selection be the Top Hit (and not the Show All button), but I should be able to choose what I want. I should be able to tell Spotlight what it should and should not index. Unfortunately, Apple is continue to making a number of liberal assumptions that force users to bend backwards and use their computer the way Apple wants them to, not the other way around. It appears that Spotlight is going to continue to be our piece of crap for quite a bit longer.

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Tags: Finder, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, options, review, search, settings, Spotlight