Editor’s Note: The eighth installment in our ongoing look at each of the new features slated for OS X 10.5 continues with this examination of the announced changes for the built-in Spotlight search functionality.
Spotlight, which was introduced with OS X 10.4, is Apple’s solution to help us find stuff on our increasingly-large hard drives. Spotlight’s goal is to make sure we never lose something again—as long as we can remember something about a file, image, application, or other item, we can find it.
How it works
Spotlight helps you track down things by indexing everything on your hard drive—including the name and contents of pretty much everything you store. Using this index, it’s then theoretically possible to find documents quickly and easily by simply typing a word, phrase, or keyword that you recall from the item to be found. As some of you may recall, I have some issues with the current implementation of Spotlight, so I was glad to see that an enhanced version of the search tool is on tap 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 implementation has been changed, with some new features as well as changes to existing ones. These additions and enhancements are designed to make working with Spotlight easier, giving the user more power. Hopefully, they’ll address many of the issues Spotlight critics like myself have with the current implementation.
What’s changed
One big change in Leopard’s take on Spotlight is that application launching is now considered a more important task than it was in Tiger. Applications are the first matches returned from a Spotlight search, and if the top hit is the application you want to launch, there’s no need to select it—it’s already highlighted, requiring just a press of the Return button to launch it. I still don’t think launcher apps such as QuickSilver, Butler, and LaunchBar have much to worry about, though, as their feature sets go well beyond that offered by Spotlight.
Finally, more Finder-like search features are built into the Spotlight search window; there’s no longer such a big disparity between the types of searches you run in the Finder and those you run in a Spotlight window. I think this is a good idea; I find myself frustrated by having to remember to use the Finder search when I want more options than I have in the Spotlight search window.
What’s new
One of the biggest new features is the ability to search networked Macs and OS X Server boxes. Many Mac owners have more than one machine, and now, you’ll be able to find stuff on any of those networked Macs with one Spotlight search.
Also new, and a most welcome addition, is Quick Look, which shows you previews of your PDFs, photos, contacts, and slideshows (and probably more) without even opening the parent application. Just select the item in Spotlight’s results list, and you’ll see the Quick Look preview. No more finding what you think is the right picture, only to discover you were wrong after waiting for Photoshop to launch and open the image.
Finally, Apple addresses an item near the top of my Spotlight gripes list with the addition of more powerful search logic to the Spotlight interface. Spotlight now supports boolean logic—you can use “AND,” “OR,” and “NOT” in your search requests. This should greatly cut down on the number of irrelevant matches found. You can also search using specific file attributes, such as author, type, or keyword, for example. It’s not clear at this point if you can also use parentheses to control the grouping of your search elements or not.
Who’s it for
Spotlight is for anyone who uses OS X. This is especially true given its prevalence not only in the system, but also in many applications such as Mail. Spotlight is the search technology for OS X users.
What’s missing
One thing that wasn’t covered in last week’s keynote is whether or not Spotlight will finally support phrase searches—I’d really like to be able to search on “some phrase,” thereby excluding any document that merely contains both “some” and “phrase” (but not in order) from my search results. This seems like something many people would want to do, but it’s not clear if Leopard will add this feature or not.
It’s also unknown if Finder searches for filenames have gotten any easier—prior to Tiger, searching by filename was fast and easy. And although Spotlight is a great technology and incredibly powerful, it actually made it tougher to do a simple filename search in the Finder.
What it means
Spotlight in Leopard appears to be gaining at least some of the missing features people have been clamoring for since Tiger’s 2005 release. Apple seems to realize that if Spotlight is the future of search on OS X, then it needs to make the tool more useful to more of the user base. 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 wait for the official release to see how all of these improvements actually play out.
[ Senior Editor Rob Griffiths runs the Mac OS X Hints Web site. ]