Push Button Paradise

In the back of my mind, I was thinking I'd be gaga over Spotlight search in OS X Tiger by now. But I'm not, and in fact I hardly ever use it.

For one thing, it's far slower than I was led to believe. Let's try an experiment. I call up Spotlight and enter "form" (A word I need to find a good quote for at the moment). 1-Mississippi, 2-Mississippi, 3, 4, 5, 6...finally some results trickling in. Nothing good near the top. 7, 8, 9, 10. Maybe something here. Oh well, this menu is too small, let's call up the window. Click "Show All". Argh! it starts out with an apparently fresh search. 1-Mississipi, 2-Mississippi, 3... How is this better than grep -r?

This is on a very recent vintage PowerBook, so it's not like ancient hardware is the problem.

The other problem is the sheer amount of results. Some of the filtering things in the full window are nice, but still tedious to use. The plugin system is interesting as well, but why encourage people to store important things in opaque, proprietary formats, when simple and standard ones will do?

Regular readers will know that I wrote (or rather adopted existing code for) a fulltext indexer. This was truly fast--as fast as I could type in a query--even on my older, 800Mhz PowerBook and with the overhead of an Ajax browser conduit. It also searched only the itds folder and all the text files therein, which is what I want 90% of the time. Oh, and I could transplant it to Windows or Linux with little or no effort. I still think there's room for a really good cross-platform product in this space. -m

posted at: 00:01 | under: 2005-05 | 0 comment(s)