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Leopard lost its Spot(light).

mcdj

mcdj

macrumors G3
Original poster
In Tiger, Spotlight largely enjoyed autonomy...a wiser, more mature, more powerful option than its cousin the Finder, it was almost an app unto itself, even though it was mostly a gussied up finder search.

In Leopard, Spotlight is washed up. A has been. Once a glorious single button answer to whatever you were looking for on your machine, Spotlight has been replaced by a mere shortcut to the finder. The gussy is gone.

Not only is Leopard's Spotlight less cool looking, it's more work to use. The hierarchal arrangement of Tiger's Spotlight search results; by kind, size, date modified, etc., viewable at a glance, without so much as a click, has been replaced with so much required clicking that it amounts to creating a smart folder every time you want to find something.

Goodbye Spotlight, hello Finder.alias

Discuss.
 
I know what you're talking about, but I think overall, the speed and usability improvements are a net positive. The Spotlight results window in Tiger was nice, but Spotlight was so slow it wasn't that great, and it was essentially useless in the Finder because of it's slow speed and poor interface. I definitely prefer Spotlight in Leopard, although I guess I agree with you that they should have kept something more like the old Spotlight "Show All" window around.
 
Here here.

It is now slower to do what i want as i have to press so many more buttons.
 
Agreed - the results come faster, but they're so mumbled it takes me longer to find what I want.

Bring hte old view back, or somebody make a program.
 
I liked the old results window, but it's just so much faster in Leopard. Honestly the amount of time it takes to search for a file on my computer in Leopard is much shorter than the time required to press more buttons.

That said I'm using Time Machine on a partition on my biggest external drive and it took about 5 days to index the partition with data on. I'm guessing Indexing and Time Machine are both very intensive tasks to bring my HDD to a grinding halt.
 
Ugh, yet another thing.

I agree on this as well. Tigers display of Spotlight was far easier to sort and understand.

If I could find a way to take Leopards Ichat back to Tiger - I think I'd do it.

Most of the "new user features" in Leopard I'm not even using. At all. I am NOT trying to under-cut the real work done down in the gears of it - just that from my perspective - I'm not getting much out of Leopard. (as of yet)

Tiger had happy surprises - not so with my new kitty.
 
NJPitcher said:
Agreed - the results come faster, but they're so mumbled it takes me longer to find what I want.

Bring hte old view back, or somebody make a program.
Click to expand...

Agreed as well, though with the faster results, it actually works as a substitute to Quicksilver. Though they should at least for the Spotlight more menu, return it to the old additional results window.
 
I prefer the new spotlight. But then i rarely used the actual spotlight window. Perhaps the finder could have a new sort by type view that is similar to the old spotlight?
 
raggedjimmi said:
I liked the old results window, but it's just so much faster in Leopard.
Click to expand...
Maybe that's because Leopard is skipping your Library (and System I think) folders when you search via Spotlight. Try to find a .plist via Spotlight. You get nuthin'. To include System in your search you have to click 43 extra buttons...hence my comparison to creating a Smart Folder when you want to do a search.
 
mcdj said:
Maybe that's because Leopard is skipping your Library (and System I think) folders when you search via Spotlight. Try to find a .plist via Spotlight. You get nuthin'. To include System in your search you have to click 43 extra buttons...hence my comparison to creating a Smart Folder when you want to do a search.
Click to expand...

Well it is only 7 extra buttons/clicks but yeah it is so annoying to have to do it each time and it is slower than in Tiger because of having to mouse around.
 
xUKHCx said:
Well it is only 7 extra buttons/clicks but yeah it is so annoying to have to do it each time and it is slower than in Tiger because of having to mouse around.
Click to expand...

Spotlight just doesn't look good or even work good anymore. It's fast yeah, but, where's my organized spotlight window? I used to love that thing. It was so helpful. Now, it just comes up as an unorganized list of files... and of course you get a zillion hits if you're searching the contents. Also, it's annoying that when I use the search box in a Finder window, it ALWAYS reverts to search the entire computer instead of THAT FOLDER. I think the default should be the current folder first and then choose entire computer when you want to search the entire computer.
 
Yeah totally agree, it was amazing now i find it mediocre. To the point where i can't be bothered with it and i'll manually hunt down the file myself.
 
If you mean the configuration available for Spotlight under System Preferences - nothing in there helps with my issue.
 
solvs said:
You guys do know that you can configure Spotlight right?
Click to expand...

There is almost no configuration in spotlight. All you can do is "remove" Apple's pre-defined search criteria or add a third party's addition to search a particular file type.

That doesn't nothing of us that the category break downs are missing and that it isn't searching key parts of our system.

Nevertheless, we always appreciate input! 🙂
 
What annoys me with SL is that it can't remember the location of recent searches. I'm fine with it taking 4s to find a file the first time, but why does it have to spend another 4s trying to find the exact same file in a subsequent search?
 
I never really used spotlight and I don't think I've used it at all since I installed Leopard, so I'm not particularly bothered.
 
solvs said:
You can add those parts manually, no?
Click to expand...

What by going into a cmd+alt+spacebar, pressing the plus. Then press System Files and then press include.

That takes so much more time then the old cmd+spacebar in Tiger.

Or are you talking about something different.
 
Yea Spotlight has definitely been watered down. Apple has definitely gone "click happy" with Leopard. First it was the confirmation when you tried emptying your trash bin (which can be disabled) then it was the warning message about running a new application for the first time, and now the new Spotlight. I suppose mocking UAC for all these months has come back to bite us 🙁
 
GSMiller said:
Yea Spotlight has definitely been watered down. Apple has definitely gone "click happy" with Leopard. First it was the confirmation when you tried emptying your trash bin (which can be disabled) then it was the warning message about running a new application for the first time, and now the new Spotlight.
Click to expand...

I haven't installed 10.5 yet, but to be fair, the Empty Trash confirmation and warning when running a new app for the first time were both in previous versions of OS X. IIRC, the app confirmation was introduced in 10.3 and the Trash confirmation has been around as long as OS X.
 
i agree the new spotlight-in-finder is a joke.

a) it opens up the finder-window too small every time (and doesn't save your finder window settings like size, mode, etc.)

b) there's no hierarchy (like before) where you could immediately spot the filetypes differences and order.

really annoying, hope it's being fixed soon
 
jwkay said:
I haven't installed 10.5 yet, but to be fair, the Empty Trash confirmation and warning when running a new app for the first time were both in previous versions of OS X. IIRC, the app confirmation was introduced in 10.3 and the Trash confirmation has been around as long as OS X.
Click to expand...

Really? The must not have been enabled by default because I never seen any of them in Tiger. 😕
 
xUKHCx said:
What by going into a cmd+alt+spacebar, pressing the plus. Then press System Files and then press include.
Click to expand...

Hmm

This is a behaviour I hadn't noticed, so apparently it didn't bother me.

I had to look into it to figure out why -- when I use the <command>-<space> spotlight I'm almost always looking for documents by content and filename, which is exactly what it does. I've been very pleased and use spotlight from the UI far more in Leopard than I ever did in Tiger because of the speed.

When I'm looking for something like a plist -- I've never found it convenient to use the spotlight UI. Since I'm going to drop to the terminal already, I've always used mdfind, which targets better.

On a test mdfind does still seem to pick up the system contents.

Possibly this is the kind of behaviour Apple was expecting ... I do find it odd that they didn't give an option for you to include the system searches by default, but I'm betting a bit of digging will lead to a plist change that will do this.
 
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