Disappointed by Spotlight...

[OldCorpse]

OldCorpse: try reindexing. I think that will help more than anything. Also, if you bought your copy of Mac OS X Tiger within the last three months, or if you have AppleCare, give Apple support a call. Better yet, go to www.apple.com/support to find a help guide.

What happens when you create, say, a .txt file in Word (or a .doc file for that matter), save it, then Spotlight it?

Well, I hate to bother the Apple folks (I'm still within my 90 days of phone support), as they deal enough with newbie questions... no need to add to their costs of doing business when I can hopefully deal with the problem myself that way if we all keep the costs down, maybe Apple will have more $ for development

Back on topic - to be honest, I haven't had much need to search .txt or .doc files as I'm very organized and I basically remember where I keep things. The thing with the cache though, was those were files not created by me, so I didn't know right off the bat where they were. Sure, after Spotlight failed, I dug around and found them, but I was disappointed that Spotlight didn't do it - what's it for? Seems like the idea is that Spotlight will tell you about all the files you often already know about (because you created them), and skips all the files you can't possibly know the location of, because you didn't create create them. That's what I call bass ackward

Then again, I'll look into your re-indexing suggestion - because I've also had Spotlight fail on a whole bunch of files I imported from my PC (like 6GB in various formats). Maybe it didn't index them properly? Who knows.

 

[huck500]

Spotlight

I use spotlight all the time, and it's never failed to find what I wanted. When I search for 'cache', I get 520 or so hits. I can type in the name of one of my students, and it gives me her report card, my conference schedule, all e-mails she's mentioned in, and the contact card for her mom.

I'd like a little more context to the files, personally, so I know where it is in a glance. I know I can open an info window, but I don't need a giant icon, just a path would be good. Maybe you can do this, I haven't played with it much.

I'm curious, what application was it unable to find?

 

[VanNess]

I know I can open an info window, but I don't need a giant icon, just a path would be good. Maybe you can do this, I haven't played with it much.

If you search using Spotlight from the menu bar, then you can set your cursor on one of the search results from the drop-down list and after a second or two, you'll see the typical small yellow window appear with the path to the file or whatever it is.

 

[Project]

I think its great, but there is lots of room for improvement, mostly in the user interface side of things.

Getting metadata into your files should be MUCH easier. Look to Vista on the kind of thing im talking about. Every single save/open dialogue and explorer window has a bar at the bottom for entering tags, ratings and other metadata. Much cleaner solution than ctrl-I on a file and entering spotlight comments.

 

[.Andy]

OK, maybe you think I overreacted, but seriously, you think your answer was appropriate? Here's what you said:

"So out of all the things you can do and search for with spotlight the only thing that is of any earthly use to you is searching your cache? Maybe I'm missing something but what do you search it for? How did you search it before spotlight?"

"the only thing of any earthly use to you"?? "How did you search it before"?

Whoa hold on there buddy - lighten up. I was just pointing out that you were discounting Spotlight based on the inability to search your cache was ridiculous. There's heaps of other things that it does and people find it useful for - myself included - and they posted examples although you seemed not interested. The things it does well are what 99% of users would want to do and what Apple advertises it for - documents, pdfs, mail, applications.

To reiterate my previous post I asked how and why you searched the cache before because it's something I've never done. It might add some functionality to my computer/work that I've not used before. It might have also given me a clue if i could help. But you came out swinging. Perhaps you shouldn't immediately jump to negative conclusions about people's posts. Paranoia is a very unnattractive attribute.

 

[jadekitty24]

Not that this will be helpful, but here's my 2 cents. I find no use for Spotlight and would just love to be rid of it. Not that it's caused any problems for me, but I don't care for having anything on my system that isn't useful to me. I keep my documents in my documents folder, my music in my music folder, etc. I know where everything is. That and dashboard. The 2 main features of 10.4. I've read lots of posts and articles about these 2 features and a lot of comments I see when someone gives a negative opinion is "Well why didn't you just stick with Panther?". Cracks me up.