Spotlight in Leopard—a few questions

[killmoms]

Okay, so I was messing about with Spotlight in Tiger today. I've had OS X Tiger since it came out but I've never really used Spotlight in the Finder very much for whatever reason. Because of a thread on another set of forums complaining about some weaknesses of iTunes, I decided to see if I could help the guy out using Spotlight.

I was amazed to find how limited it is! I did a search for music files with the genre Electronica and was surprised to find I had NO intelligent sort options at all—just name or date! Even in a saved search (smart folder) I couldn't spawn extra columns to display other information or sort! I guess I got spoiled by how powerful BeOS's Tracker was with queries and saved queries back in the day that I expected Apple's implementation would be equally useful.

I'm wondering if any Leopard beta testers/developers have seen any specific improvements to Spotlight/Finder that would allow more powerful queries, more custom sorting in the Finder... that sort of thing. I remember Steve mentioning they were working to improve Spotlight, but he didn't go into it at all at WWDC last year (and obviously not at MWSF at the beginning of this year).

 

[wrldwzrd89]

What is known at this point is that Leopard's Spotlight will be able to search more metadata parameters, search computers over the network (with permission), and support extended Boolean queries (AND/OR/NOT).

Have you looked at the Leopard Preview page on Apple's site? If not, take a look. It explains these things better than I could.

Disclaimer: The information contained in this post is based on facts from Apple's site and various rumors. It may or may not be 100% accurate.

 

[solvs]

I usually find the Finder's search easier to use than the regular Spotlight, even though the results are the same. There are more options in the Finder or Find command. You'd think Show All would just bring up the same window as -F, but it doesn't.

Leopard doesn't seem much better, but that could change in the final version.

 

[killmoms]

I usually find the Finder's search easier to use than the regular Spotlight, even though the results are the same. There are more options in the Finder or Find command. You'd think Show All would just bring up the same window as -F, but it doesn't.

Leopard doesn't seem much better, but that could change in the final version.

That's actually what I was talking about, the + F incarnation of Spotlight. Basically I want the Finder to be more like BeOS's Tracker... it was so good. Still stuff Apple could stand to learn from what's gone before.

 

[PYR0M310N]

yeah i'm having a problem without been able to delete a file thats affecting loads of others, and spotlight can't see it for some reason

 

[wrldwzrd89]

yeah i'm having a problem without been able to delete a file thats affecting loads of others, and spotlight can't see it for some reason

Is this file located in one of the hidden UNIX folders or the System folder? Spotlight is pre-programmed not to search or index these locations, and this behavior cannot be changed