Tag Archives: spotlight

Lion: Spotlight still broken

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I’ve installed [Mac OS X 10.7][lion] (upgrading from 10.6) and was very interested to see how the new search tokens feature would work in Spotlight. But on my Mac it doesn’t. Here’s the result of a search for files whose name contains the text “david buxton”:

Note how none of the files in that list has a name containing the text “david buxton”.

Perhaps deleting the Spotlight index would fix things. Meh.

[lion]: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/06/06Mac-OS-X-Lion-With-250-New-Features-Available-in-July-From-Mac-App-Store.html

My Mac is broken: Spotlight example 1

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Gah.

Just thinking about having to find files on a Macintosh fills me with dread. Spotlight is useless for finding anything unless you know where it is already. I am in the half of the Venn diagram labelled *believes names of files and folders have meaning*. In the other half are the interface designers of [Apple’s Spotlight technology][spotlight].

Here’s a plum example of how a Spotlight window in Mac OS X 10.5.3 does an alphabetic sort-by-name of results when searching for files using *File Name* criteria.

Spotlight's notion of an alphabetical sort

I hate Spotlight. Makes me wonder what the point of all that amazing search engine technology is.

[spotlight]: http://developer.apple.com/macosx/spotlight.html
[pic]: http://reliablybroken.com/b/wp-content/uploads/spotlight-broken-1.gif