Good-bye Spotlight
Posted on August 2, 2005
Filed Under /dev/null/ | 88 views |
Today I shut off Spotlight on my Mac. I unchecked all it’s boxes, I unchecked its keyboard shortcuts, I… have left the damned thing in the corner of menu because I can’t figure out how to remove it. I could Google it, I know it’s out there somewhere, but it annoys me that it’s not a checkbox in the Spotlight system prefs. Why isn’t it? And why can’t I just drag it out like the rest of the items in my toolbar?
Why good-bye? Because, really, I find it pretty much useless. It also tends to collide with the shortcut I’ve defined for QuickSilver (cmd-space vs. ctrl-space) and that’s a cardinal sin. Sure I could remap Spotlight to something else but less is more I figure.
I kept trying to use Spotlight to find useful things but it’s started to feel a bit like that junk you keep in that closet that you think “one day I’ll need that” so you keep it around, keep it around, and eventually… you try to sell it to the neighbours for $0.25.
But in this paraticular case I really dislike the implementation. I dislike how it sorts and orders things as they come in. I dislike the icons it displays. I dislike where it appears on my screen since I’m almost never looking in that corner when I want something.
Mostly I just find that between QuickSilver and keeping all my crap in five or six well-sorted directories I don’t have any need for Spotlight.
Good-bye Spotlight, I’d like to miss you but we just never hit it off.
Off you go to hang out with Sherlock and CyberDog in the ‘Dustbin of Slickly-Implemented and Largely Useless OS Features’. You’ll be remembered… amusingly.
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Ahh, Sherlock. I was late in the Mac game so I was well-warned of the uselessness of Sherlock and never bothered to try it. In fact, I promptly uninstalled it when I got my iBook. So, is Tiger well worth the upgrade then? I thought Spotlight was one of its most redeeming qualities…
I think… maybe. I really like Dashboard (though many do not) and - and admittedly this is a lousy reason to pay for an upgrade - lots of new software coming out is 10.4 and above, only. This is due to a number of new technologies and improvements to old technologies that Apple implemented under the hood.
On the surface is there compelling reason to upgrade? Honestly with the exception of Dashboard I’m hard-pressed to tell the difference between 10.3 and 10.4 so if you’ve got all the software you need then no, probably not…except for the forward compatibility.
If you haven’t found a reason to upgrade yet then you might want to wait for 10.5 and see what that throws down. I suspect, based on absolutely no information of factual quality, that it will be much more interesting.