Just going to vent a little about a minor frustration regarding a feature of the new (to me) Leopard OS on the Mac. What’s bugging me is the fact that finding files is something that should be a “no brainer” for the ubiquitous application “Finder”, right? In the old days of the Macintosh, that was one of the purposes of the Finder – to “Find” things. You would think that 25 years after the Mac was introduced, the Find function would be light years more advanced. In some ways it is, and in others, not so much.

In OS X 10.4 “Tiger”, Apple reworked the file search capability. In the old days of the Mac, it used to be you could just go select Find File, type in what you are looking for, and in a few moments, the results pop up. Simple. If it wasn’t there in the list, it just wasn’t there to be found, period. With Tiger, they added some bells and whistles to create a super Search mechanism called Spotlight. It would find “anything” that has anything to do with anything you ask for. If you search for the word “goulash”, not only will Spotlight  tell you if you have a file with “goulash” in the name, but if there is an email that mentions it even once within the message- it will reveal it to you. It even starts searching the moment you start typing your search criteria and returns results lightning quick.

Nifty, right? At least on paper, it all sounded great. But after using it a few times, it became agonizing clear that Spotlight is not your father’s find file. What’s wrong with it? Plenty.

First, to do it’s magic, Spotlight relies on an “index” to quickly find stuff. It builds this index for all hard drives on your system (unless you tell it not to). This process takes place in the background and can take several minutes – but should only need to be done once in its entirety. That’s the idea at least. Reality is not as ideal.

Spotlight indexing occurs whether you want it to or not. While you can exclude certain drives and files, the process begins without your input or approval. You can’t tell it to “start index” and you can’t tell it to “stop index” (unless you are a programmer). You can’t even pause it. There is no button or switch. And when it starts running, everything else on the Mac grinds to a near halt. It can be excruciating to wait for it to finish its thing. But ok, it is what it is – when it’s done, it’s done. Only one problem. Spotlight in Tiger has an overwhelming tendency NOT to find files! You could be literally staring at the file you want, and Spotlight may or may not see it.

Talk about flaws – this one is the grand prize winner!

All a user asks for in a search mechanism is to be able to reliably FIND things. Seems pretty reasonable. And yet, with Tiger, you have to guess whether Spotlight is telling you the truth or not. Uggh!!

Now with 10.5 Leopard, Apple has revamped Spotlight a bit. I’ve now worked with it a few weeks and have this to say. It’s both better and worse. Better in that its search results are much more reliable than in Tiger. But worse in that using the Find File shortcut is more cumbersome than it used to be. Why? Because it defaults to searching “Your Mac” and “Contents” of files. Which genius thought that was optimal? I’d really like to find his/her email address to tell them what I think of their choice. If I choose “Find File”, it means I want to.. drum roll… FIND FILES!! Not search for CONTENTS of files. But even worse, in the old days with network or attached drives, you had the ability to individually check which drives to do the search. Not so anymore – it’s all or nothing for “Shared” drives.

But wait! There’s more to (dis)like! When the results pop up, there are three sortable columns to display it all – Name, Kind, Last Opened. Hmmmm…. I get the first two. But why is there a “Last Opened” column? Let me change that to something else. Oh wait! You can’t do that. Can’t do it?! Apparently, this is not a changeable feature. Hellloooo??? This is a Macintosh I’m using, right? It’s been highly customizable since 1984, as far as I know. What’s the deal with this “feature”?

Arggghhhh!!!

Out of sheer frustration at this superb example of Apple’s “duh-ness”, I googled the problem to see what others have to say. Sure enough, I’m not alone in my frustrations with Finding Files. There are a handful of developers trying to fill the crater of a gap that Apple created. I’m glad to see that and have downloaded an application that seems to do a very decent job at finding files. But as one frustrated forum member posted, it’s astounding that Apple would/could destroy a BASIC feature of the Mac OS – one that worked perfectly well for years. Just mindboggling…

And yet, we still like and support Apple – despite these egregious oversights and mistakes in their operating systems. Why? Just try finding files on Windows XP…