Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, OS, Books and Blogs
UnTiger
Tim Bray remains down on Apple's OS X 10.4 aka Tiger. In a recent post on his blog, he finds fault with both Spotlight and Dashboard, the two new killer features of Tiger. He notes that email search with Spotlight "is egregiously stupid; it starts searching as you start typing, retaining all the settings from your last search which (in my case at least) are almost certainly wrong, forcing you to stab frantically at the control buttons (which dont appear until youve started) to point it in the right direction. But the worst thing is, it just cant find emails that I know are there when I search for words that I know are in them. (There is a solution: Open a Terminal, drill down to the directory where the messages live, then use grep). Then he goes on to note that Dashboard is largely a bit of unnecessary bloat-code (my words, not his), but concludes positively, noting: "Fortunately, the OS X value proposition—a decent Unix with a decent UI—remains solid. Im assuming that the next big cat will actually include something interesting."
I have to say that for the most part, I agree with him. I've learned to like Spotlight, but the email searching capabilities aren't by any means the bees knees. I can, and do, do without Dashboard.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
mungler said 10:53AM on 11-23-2005
for me, 10.3.9 was the sweetest OSX, though I do run 10.4.3
roll on 10.5!
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arkowi said 2:14PM on 11-23-2005
"do, do."
Yeah, dashboard sucks. dashboard reminds me of one of those programs you see and think is sooo cool. You download it and it is cool for like a day and then you un-install it because you realize it is utterly pointless. cough*konfabulator*cough.
excuse me.
Spotlight is growing on me, especially for launching random apps that are not in my dock. Someone will now post a comment saying I should be using Quicksilver, please dont.
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Oliver said 10:59AM on 11-23-2005
..which is why i'm still running 10.3.9. The way things are looking at the moment, i probably won't upgrade until Leopard.
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stevej said 11:14AM on 11-23-2005
Hmm, my email searching experience in Tiger has been pretty freaking awesome. In fact, I'd say that's one of my favorite things. I'm using Mail.app at home and Outlook at the office where I work. They're both synced with the exchange server at the office. My inbox folder has about 10,000 email messages. My spam folder has about 37,000 emails. Searching email in outlook is like pulling teeth. Sometimes I spend over 10 minutes or more searching for an email.
Using the search that's built into mail.app, I typically find what I'm looking for in a matter of 5 seconds or so. I imagine that the searchbar in mail.app is using the spotlight metadata to search. I'm not 100% sure, but I think it's just doing a spotlight search and including "kind:email" in the search text to limit search results to emails.
I'll also say that my experience with the objective c api for spotlight has been nothing but positive. You can learn a lot about what spotlight can really do by playing around with the command line tools.
mdls
mdfind
mdutil
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Richard said 1:40PM on 11-23-2005
I think Dashboard does exactly what it was intended to do, and I do find it useful from time to time.
I do wish there was a System Preferences applet to turn them completely off. But I think to dismiss it as useless code bloat across the board is extreme.
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Shaaheen said 11:55AM on 11-23-2005
Spotlight is working great for me, there are always people nagging about great products.
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Peter Koritschan said 11:56AM on 11-23-2005
C.K., you got a broken image link in the post...
cheers
pete
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Ian Charles said 12:04PM on 11-23-2005
One of his problems is the fact its starts searching as he types. i love that feature.
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nzahn said 1:03PM on 11-23-2005
I think people don't realize the potential of dashboard in the future; bloat code? We will see, but I am certain it will be the next big step for apple in software development.
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mungler said 12:04PM on 11-23-2005
i think the Spotlight technology is wonderful, under the hood. the implementation of the UI to it is pretty dire so far, however.
hopefully Leopard will put a lot of this right.
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Lewis said 12:59PM on 11-23-2005
I have had some bad experiences with Spotlight as well. I've had it miss application when searching. That seems like a pretty big hole to me. So once burned it becomes hard to trust the results. Is it really there or not?
I also find Dashboard to be more of a fluff item than anything. I suppose I just haven't yet found that widget I can't live without.
10.3.9 is pretty rock solid. I tell people to stay with that unless they really are dying to use one of the new Tiger additions.
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Matthew Fitzsimmons said 12:45PM on 11-23-2005
It really annoys me that people say that Tiger isn't worth it just because Spotlight and Dashboard aren't all they're cracked up to be.
I'm slowly using spotlight more and more, although it is a tad quirky in mail. I use Dashboard for a couple of items, but I use Konfabulator more. The Package Tracker from Monkey Business Labs is good, and I have a couple of other programs that include Dashboard widgets that I use.
I have a client who has so many documents that Spotlight has been a lifesaver for her. She's pretty much lost without it now.
That being said, there are a ton more new features in Tiger than that. I started putting together a list of things a while back, and never finished, but a quick breeze through it will show some of the many improvements http://fitzage.net/tiger/
I think the enhancements to Preview alone are almost enough to justify the cost of Tiger. :-)
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gr33n said 2:15PM on 11-23-2005
(There is a solution: Open a Terminal, drill down to the directory where the messages live, then use grep)
great, but what does it mean "to use grep" ?
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timbck2 said 2:03PM on 11-23-2005
I rarely use Spotlight, and I forget Dashboard exists. But in my experience, Tiger is much more stable and performs better (faster) than any previous version of OS X I've used (that goes back to Jaguar). That stability alone justifies the cost of the upgrade.
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Microdot said 2:07PM on 11-23-2005
i dont find much use for spotlight itself in the os too often (im organized... i know where my files are and its quicker for me to just grab what i need. call me old school) however, the email searching is unbelieveable. its one of my favorite features. i use it both at the office (with a store of over 12,000 emails) and at home (with usually only a couple of hundred at best) and just flat out cant live without it. i think he may have a pebkac issue.
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Eric said 2:12PM on 11-23-2005
I completely agree with mungler... 10.3.9 was where it was at.. It is like Apple hired a completely different set of people (bad people) to code 10.4. The issues that crop up in 10.4 are so ridiculous... they should have disappeared in 10.2.5. I keep hoping that with each update these things will disappear... We have all seen the bug counts "10.4.x repairs 600 bugs" etc... If I had it to do all over again, I would have stuck with 10.3.9. However, after going through the trouble to install and get everything set up... I'll just deal for now.
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tom barta said 10:38AM on 11-24-2005
Dashboard could be a cool learn-to-program tool for a lot of hobbyists.
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kvocal said 2:27PM on 11-23-2005
I think this guy is in some alternate universe. Some times dashboard can be a little buggy, but it is a newly implemented app. Spot light on the other hand is alive saver. I wish I could use the Mail App with my Notes server. It has helped me out on a number of occasions.
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Wai-Tung Leung said 2:36PM on 11-23-2005
I'm still on OS 10.2.8 Jaguar! I'm reluctant to upgrade upon hearing all these negatives about Tiger; at this point I might just buy a new (hopefully Intel) PowerBook next year for University rather than upgrade my 3 year old iMac. I'll be interested to see what 10.5 will offer, probably leap years ahead of 10.2 if I was to change directly to that.
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Adrian said 6:35PM on 12-16-2005
I recently had Mail not find an e-mail I knew existed, even when I search from multiple angles. Finally dug through by hand and found it, but made me lose a little confidence.
That being said, I do find Spotlight and Mail's search capabilities handy when I need them, and am glad this feature exists.
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