Spotlight, the new Finder?
My files are a mess on my Mac. I try to put them in some order, but no matter what scheme I come up with invariably after a few days I go back to putting everything on my desktop. After awhile of looking at that I create a folder called 'Desktop Stuff' and throw all the files into it. Not exactly the best way to keep myself organized, but the one thing that keeps this from working is deep, fast searching.Enter Spotlight, the Tiger feature that everyone loves, the saviour of the unorganized. Giles Turnbull recently had a chance to see someone from Apple demo Tiger for some journalists. The most interesting thing to come out of the meeting was that the person doing the demo no longer tires to keep his files in order. Why bother, he figures, since Spotlight indexes his file in near realtime.
I think I might be in love with an operating system. Tiger, will you marry me? Or at least clean up after me?
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My files are a mess on my Mac. I try to put them in some order, but no matter what scheme I come up with invariably after a few days I go...
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John Siracusa's excellent review of Tiger goes into depth about Spotlight and related topics. http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/
May 02 2005 at 12:53 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyI have been using Spotlight and really love it. I intended to start to get lazy with my orginization, but I just can't make myself do that. Here is the problem that I found. If everything is in one folder, it is fine as long as I want to just use it on this computer. But if I want to copy all of the papers out for one class...I have to search them from from spotlight one by one then copy them over. On the other hand, if I hve them all in a folder already then I just copy over the folder. Oh well.
April 27 2005 at 4:19 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply*also has nested folders names "desktop stuff"*
April 27 2005 at 12:16 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyI used to have a ton of stuff on my desktop, but then I ran Eole, and now the mess is moved from the desktop to Documents/Pictures/Movies/Music... I still can't find anything I'm going to love Spotlight :D
April 27 2005 at 10:17 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyEd Fladung: with Spotlight, you won't need to remember the name of the file. All its metadata AND contents are indexed, so remembering a few words from it should do.
April 27 2005 at 5:24 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyMark Quicksilver is pretty good and has a lot of plug ins, thanks for the tip but it doesnt let you search within a document like spotlight will.
April 27 2005 at 1:37 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyI think spotlight is going to be great and all, but there's still something to be said for good old-fashioned organized folders. At the very least, browsing through well organized folders has helped me rediscover files I had forgotten all about. Spotlight will be great if you know what you're looking for, but you still need an organizational hierarchy to re-locate files you didn't know to search for.
April 26 2005 at 7:37 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyI wa sthe same way for many years then I found an app called quicksilver. Quicksilver will work wonders for all you panther people until you get tiger then. It is a very similar concept to spotlight and works great. And yeah it's free. http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/
April 26 2005 at 7:13 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyWow. Amazing how many of us call that folder "Desktop Stuff" :)
April 26 2005 at 7:12 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyCan not believe you even name the folder the same as I do. hahaha! Absurb. I can't wait for Tiger to get here, Spotlight is number 4 on my list of reason on upgrading early.
April 26 2005 at 5:59 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyHot Apps on TUAW
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