Filed under: OS
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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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Thomas Mango said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
spotlight is definitely going to lead to more unorganized people. hopefully habits on your computer don't invest the rest of your life!
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Thomas Mango said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
invest = infest.
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bryan said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
I am usually ok but when I get Tiger i have decided to throw everything into one folder to see exactly how good spotlight is at finding files for me
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Ed Fladung said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
"After awhile of looking at that I create a folder called 'Desktop Stuff' and throw all the files into it."
Haha! That's hilarious, I do the same thing. I have older 'desktop stuff' folders inside of 'desktop stuff' folders inside of newer 'desktop stuff' folders.
I'm looking forward to a completely "hands off" file system, where we just use spotlight. the trick that apple will really have to solve is that when I need a file and I've forgotten the name, how else will I be able to find it with spotlight? categories? tags? how many different kinds of meta data will we be able to add to the spotlight 2.0?
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Pedro said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
it will be much easier just to toss everything into documents and just let spotlight do all the work for you. my big pet peeve is photos... i refuse to use iphoto and am crazy about keeping crazy accurate root folder structure, but try to find a paper or work contracts... ha!
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Chef said 6:56PM on 8-27-2005
Can 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.
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Laurie said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
Wow. Amazing how many of us call that folder "Desktop Stuff" :)
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Mark said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
I 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/
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Dan said 9:29AM on 9-01-2005
I 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.
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bryan said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
Mark
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.
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Small Paul said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
Ed 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.
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Magnus said 4:32PM on 8-21-2005
I 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
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peeweejd said 8:23AM on 6-24-2005
*also has nested folders names "desktop stuff"*
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Brian said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
I 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.
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Scott J. Kramer said 1:59PM on 12-13-2005
John Siracusa's excellent review of Tiger goes into depth about Spotlight and related topics.
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/
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