Spotlight
The other big feature of Tiger is its system-wide, fully indexed meta-data based search engine called Spotlight. Apple best describes what now happens in Tiger to support Spotlight: "Every time a file is created, saved, moved, copied, or deleted, the file system automatically ensures that the file is properly indexed, cataloged, and ready for whatever search query might be issued..."Because of the constant indexing of every file written to the hard drive(s) in your Mac, searches using Spotlight complete in somewhere between 1 - 2 seconds on a G5, and a little longer on the mini or on a PowerBook G4. Compared to the "old way" of searching, Spotlight searches are virtually instantaneous and they produce far more relevant results. The first time that you start up Tiger, Spotlight will take time to crunch away and index your entire drive. This process ended up taking less than 20 minutes on all of the machines that I tested, as long as I left them alone while it was working (and less than 10 minutes on the G5s).
The search box looks no different than a Google search box in modern day browsers; of course, with the exception of its distinct blue surrounding color. As you type in your search query, Spotlight immediately gets to work - the results list is populated as you continue to type out your query.
The Spotlight window gives you even more options, such as looking at all of the results, how you want to group or sort the results, and even where you'd like to search. It's rare that I have to resort to looking through the Spotlight window to find what I need (the top hits are usually spot-on for me), but when I do, it's very handy.
Spotlight's true power is in the fact that it is fully extensible - so application developers can harness Spotlight's power within their own applications. Apple does a great job of this in many of their applications that are updated with Tiger. Mail 2.0 now searches through all of your mailboxes using Spotlight - so the Find function is actually useful now. Finder takes advantage of Spotlight in that you can now create Smart Folders that dynamically populate themselves based on search criteria. For example, I'm horrendously bad at making sure that I keep all videos I download in one location; little ones that I don't care much about remain in my downloads folder, while others that I find particularly funny or worthwhile will be stored somewhere else. I can now create a Smart Folder that is just for movies, so whenever a movie file is downloaded, created or edited, Smart Folder will update itself to include that movie file. While Smart Folders may look and work just like folders, they are still just a display of Spotlight search results, and as such, you can't peer into them at the command prompt, for example.
Spotlight will even search through System Preferences - just search for what you're trying to do (e.g. Dashboard keyboard shortcut) and a real-time spotlight effect will appear over the icons that contain options matching your search criteria. This feature of Spotlight is particularly useful for beginners and folks who aren't as familiar with OS X System Preferences.
More than anything, Spotlight has become my number one choice of navigating through my file system or even navigating normally through most applications. For example, I was reading through my emails on my PowerBook one day and I wanted to reply to an email from a person named Terri. I knew I only had one email from her in my Inbox, but it was further down in my inbox - I'd just have to scroll to it. On the PowerBook, instead of moving my hand down to the trackpad, I found it quick to hit Cmd + Space, type in "Terri", and then just arrow down to her email and hit enter. It may seem like a lot of steps compared to just scrolling down, but it actually took me less time - it's that fast.
You can actually add meta-data for Spotlight to search by adding "Spotlight Comments" in the info pane of any file.
From a productivity standpoint, Spotlight is a huge feature - it really does change the way that you navigate and is especially useful on platforms where navigation is more of a pain (e.g. notebooks). One thing I realized is that Spotlight is the type of feature that's tough to appreciate if you actually use it on a regular basis. Before I started using Tiger, I craved the feature, but now that I've been using it on a regular basis, it tends to lose its initial excitement and becomes another tool that just works. It's when you don't have Spotlight that you really begin to appreciate its power and potential. The next-generation of applications designed for Tiger should hopefully take full advantage of Spotlight, making searching for anything on your computer just as easy and as accurate as finding something on the web.
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melgross - Sunday, May 1, 2005 - link
#21 With all that you said, you didn't really say very much.Yes, it's true that Apple is mostly a hardware company. They will sell "only" a billion dollars of software this year.
But what you forget is that every Mac that sells takes away a sale of a copy of Windows from MS. Apple will sell more that a million more computers this year than they sold last year. That's over a million fewer copies of Windows sold. As well as less copies of windows software by MS and others. It also means more copies of MS Office for the Mac sold.
It's just dumb talking about "balls". This is a business. Maybe you like to play chicken, but companies that like to stay in business don't.
Perhaps if Apple licensed the Mac OS to MS both times when MS came knocking on their door life would have been different. :)
michael2k - Saturday, April 30, 2005 - link
#21: If anyone compares Longhorn to Tiger, it's because Microsoft has decided it's a valid comparison:http://insight.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,39020463,391...
Allchin has made public comments regarding Tiger, when talking about Longhorn.
On a technical level, Longhorn is implementing many of the features that Tiger, Panther, and Jaguar have, so comparison is unavoidable:
Avalon vs Quartz
Metro vs PDF
DB/WinFS vs Spotlight/HFS+
etc
Eug - Saturday, April 30, 2005 - link
#20: "So while Apple keeps braying to the moon about "Longhorn" I, on the other hand, am content to wait until Longhorn actually ships before making any sort of comparisons as I would prefer any comparisons that might be made to have some *meaning*...;)"Uh... I should point out that the Apple Mac OS X pages don't have a single reference to Longhorn anywhere, AFAIK.
Ocaid - Saturday, April 30, 2005 - link
The fact, "Jack", is that this is marketing and Apple does make nice hardware and a great OS for some people. And I do agree with some of your salient points. But for a company that "is not a direct competitor to MS", some of you guys sure seem to worry a lot about them.WaltC - Saturday, April 30, 2005 - link
I completely fail to understand this comparison with Longhorn...;) I mean, at one level I do understand it all too well--Apple PR, while completely ignoring Windows x64 as if it does not exist, enjoys boasting that it has "beaten" Longhorn out of the starting gate as a "64-bit" OS--but really this is just so very lame and completely transparent. Apple has always had an exquisite case of tunnel vision when it comes to picking and choosing what it will compare its products to...:DSo this whole "Longhorn-Tiger" comparison is so predictible and infantile (as Tiger is shipping and Longhorn isn't--so nobody has a clue as to what Longhorn will be when it actually does ship a year or two from now) and right on par for Apple PR. So typical of Apple to compare its products with products that aren't shipping--wow, how much "safer" can you can get than that? So while Apple keeps braying to the moon about "Longhorn" I, on the other hand, am content to wait until Longhorn actually ships before making any sort of comparisons as I would prefer any comparisons that might be made to have some *meaning*...;)
In this vein, I also wish that people would wake up and realize that Apple and Microsoft are not now direct competitors and never have been...;) Microsoft is software company--Apple is distinctly a hardware company--and the old saw in the industry is that the highest and best purpose for *any* Mac OS is that it serves as a dongle to protect and promote Apple's hardware sales.
The classic mistake that I see so often is this misunderstanding that Microsoft and Apple somehow compete in the same markets--not true. Apple's competitors in reality are companies like Dell, etc., who--unlike Microsoft--make better than 90% of their net income from hardware sales. It's pretty simple, really, as >98% of Microsoft's net income is from the sale of software exclusive of hardware. The difference is so vast I am surprised it is so often overlooked. And yet it is...
For instance, if Apple would decide to undertake to write an OS for the same x86 hardware standards that Microsoft does (Intel/AMD promulgated standards, mainly) *then* we could call them competitors with a straight face since they'd be competing for share in the same hardware markets. But the simple fact is that Microsoft doesn't even *make* the computers which run its OS's (and so of course cannot and does not profit directly from such hardware sales); but an Apple OS, on the other hand, is totally useless in the absence of an Apple designed-and-sold computer to run it. The enormous differences ought to be clear as daylight to everyone.
Basically, the concept that an Apple OS is any sort of direct competition to a Microsoft OS is purely a wishful and irresponsible--not to mention inaccurate--fantasy. That's why talking about Apple's <3% share of the annual world-wide *desktop* computer market (which is far, far less in the exclusive server markets, or higher in the notebook markets, etc.)is somewhat of a bogus comparison in the first place. MS OS's serve "everybody else" apart from Microsoft (eg, Dell and the thousands of other companies manufacturing x86 PCs and components exclusive of Microsoft) while Apple's OS's serve only Apple-branded hardware exclusively. I am always surprised as to why this salient fact of the matter is so often ignored. But there it is...
I'd love to see Apple competing directly with Microsoft in the much larger hardware arena of x86 platforms and standards--I would welcome the competition. But I honestly don't think Apple can compete in that market--and I believe that's exactly why Apple doesn't even try. I'd love to see Apple offer its own Apple-branded x86 PCs along with an Apple x86 OS which would run on "everybody else's" x86 box just as Microsoft's OS's currently do--but I'll tell you right now that I'm not going to hold my breath waiting on that to happen as I don't believe it ever will. Frankly, I don't believe Apple has either the balls or the brains or the will to do it--and that's the fact, Jack...:D
michael2k - Saturday, April 30, 2005 - link
#11: Obviously the article is not meant for you then. Does it occur to you that there are other reasons to use computers than play games? Video games are not the end all and be all of the computing experience.HansZarkow - Saturday, April 30, 2005 - link
Repeatedly reading about how buggy Tiger is makes me wonder, why Apple pushed the release. Panther was doing alright and Apple is generally rather thorough when it comes to that.I think Tiger was originally to be released in 2H05 around the same time that Longhorn was scheduled. Then Microsoft pushed the release date back a year. Now Apple faced the situation that they couldn't release 10.5 only a year after 10.4.
So not only wouldn't they be able to react to some features that Longhorn might bring along, but they would also leave Microsoft an undistored PR-window where they would be mere spectators.
Hence, Apple rushed the Tiger-release to 1H05, approximately 18 months after Panther. That gives them another 18 months to fine-tune 10.4 and come up with an answer to every feature that Longhorn might pack.
It's the price of being Apple, the (self-proclaimed) technology-leader, they can't let Microsoft talk about the (possible) advantages of Longhorn for half a year.
This makes sense from a PR point-of-view, but it is definetly unfair to the people buying 10.4 because I doubt it will see its full potential before 10.4.3
vailr - Saturday, April 30, 2005 - link
#13: Not correct! My 3.2 GHz P4/WinXP machine can run PearPC/MacOSX 10.3.9, with "About this Mac" info indicating that it's a "Mac G3 running at 1.32 GHz".So, would be interested to see whether: WinXP64/PearPC/MacOSX 10.4, running on an "upper echelon" AMD64 chip could compete, speedwise, with OSX Tiger, running on native Mac hardware?
jasonsRX7 - Saturday, April 30, 2005 - link
I don't know if it's just because I'm more used to it, but I still like Quicksilver better than Spotlight. I find QS to be faster and more functional. Maybe Spotlight just needs to grow on me some more.DerekWilson - Saturday, April 30, 2005 - link
#15 ... is that a joke (and coincedence) or an attempt to bring up the legal suit being brought against Apple by Tiger Direct for the use of the Tiger name?Haven't kept up with that much myself -- though it did seem fishy that they waited until this week to bring up the issue.
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/28/...