Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Review

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). 

To activate Spotlight is simple; the default keyboard shortcut is Cmd + Space, although you can configure it to be anything that you'd like.  If you're not a keyboard junkie, then simply click the magnifying glass in the upper right hand corner of your screen to bring up the Spotlight search box.  Interacting with Spotlight is quite possibly the least intrusive thing ever, especially given the power of the function.  Hitting "Cmd + Space" while typing this article opens the search box and switches focus to it; if I decide that I've made a mistake, I can either hit "Cmd + Space" again or hit "escape" and focus is restored to my original application. There's nothing that you need to quit and no headaches - it's seamless. 

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 search box expands to include the top hits of your search in any of the categories that you have told Spotlight to search in.  You can control the categories from which Spotlight will display results by using the Spotlight preferences pane. You can even configure how the results are displayed.  If you see what you're searching for in this initial list of results, you can simply scroll down to the item that you want and hit "enter" to open it, or you can select Show All to bring you to the Spotlight window.

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. 

As I mentioned before, Spotlight searches any and everything on your computer - documents, emails, logged chat sessions, images, folders, anything you want.  Even Adium X, my preferred IM client on OS X, gets searched; although it doesn't specifically support Spotlight, Adium X stores my IM logs as HTML files, which are then indexed and searched just like anything else. 

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. 

My experience with Spotlight has been extremely positive. I never use search bars in anything else anymore - especially because it just takes one quick keystroke combination to bring it up and you can do that from any application.  The Cmd + Space keyboard shortcut makes a lot of sense and works very well even on the PowerBook, since my thumbs are naturally very close to those two keys. 

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. 

Spotlight is even usable from the command prompt; use the mdfind command to search for something and use mdls (a play on the Unix ls command) to display all of the meta-data associated with a particular file. 

There is one peculiarity with Spotlight that I've encountered, and that is that it doesn't seem to update its index as often as Apple would have you believe - at least not all the time.  The best example I have is while I was writing this article in Pages, I decided to try to search for two words that I knew were contained within the article - the phrase I used was "New Calculators".  Much to my surprise, Spotlight did not list this Pages document as one of the results.  I tried saving again, closing Pages and re-opening it, and nothing worked.  I even tried exporting to a Word document, modifying and saving it and still got nowhere.  Even a reboot didn't fix the problem.  I left my desk for about 30 minutes and came back only to find that the file had been indexed in the time that I was gone.  The problem wasn't regularly repeatable, so I have no idea what caused it, but for the most part, Spotlight seems to index and search the way it should. 

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.