Filed under: OS
Jason Snell places spotlight on . . . er, Spotlight
Over at his current Macworld editorial blog post, Jason Snell takes a long hard gander at Spotlight after using it for a good solid week. He notes that it blows any previous Apple search tool out of the water, but also writes that "oddly enough, Spotlight is also the Tiger feature that I feel the most ambivalent about. As cool as Spotlight is, its still a first-generation technology thats got a bunch of quirks, some mildly annoying and some absolutely maddening." His take is interesting and right on the money. I agree with the entire thing.
Also, I forgot entirely about that whole smart folders functionality. That's the coolest. I have to go play with that right now.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Leo said 4:18PM on 6-16-2005
I tried using smart folders to look for files on my desktop. So I search for file pathname : contains : desktop.
Nothing.
file pathname : contains : applications. Nothing.
Also note that the description of this search option (click kind at the start, then others and look for file pathname) is mispelt as pathanme.
Heh. Bug? Or am I missing something? And how do you report such things without having to be a developer anyway?
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djones said 4:18PM on 6-16-2005
To the author of the linked post: have you not heard of cmd+space, man? He's talking about how hard it is to find things by actual filename. This pulls them up for me instantly. Doing it his (slower and more tedious) way in Finder will do it too. If you don't like the results, edit your Spotlight preferences to sort and show how you want to see it.
Someone on that site commented about getting a spinning ball after typing in one letter before being allowed to continue the type and find: he has an indexed drive(s) set to sleep whenever available (turned on by default in Tiger). That pause is the drive getting power and spinning back up. Avoid by turning that option off under Energy Saver prefs.
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djones said 4:18PM on 6-16-2005
Leo: I can't get that to work either (and lmao at the misspelling.) I don't know if that's supposed to be reserved for some use that isn't apparent, but you can do what you want by using the "Where" attribute. Under General in a Get Info window, that's where the path is listed. Perhaps Pathname is the depricated name of that attribute, and was supposed to be removed?
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ben Parzybok said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
Following up on the File Pathname spotlight attribute not working (I'm also trying to apply a smart folder to every item on my desktop), and then the second comment about how you can use the Where attribute....
Where is the 'Where' attribute? I see 'Where from', but this seems to be related to the original location, such as if a file was sent to you via email, the email would be the original location.
What I want to do is set up an automated archival system for my desktop, so that files disappear into a folder after 2 days or something. Any ideas?
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