I absolutely hate the new find in OS X Tiger. I didn’t think I’d like it when I saw it, I didn’t like it when I got it, now it’s a few months later and I still hate it.
When I want to search for a file name it automatically searches inside the files too, so I get a million more hits than there are just files. And you can’t easily separate from the two (filenames or contents). Plus you can’t easily sort by date or filename, it breaks it down by category.
And Spotlight should allow me to control/right-click on a name to open the folder, not the item. If it’s a zip or sit file and you just want to find it, it uncompresses it if you click it…
For being this huge new “feature” it’s not very friendly. I looked to see if the old find was still there but I don’t see it anywhere. :(
I say “easily” in that I don’t know how, so I really mean I can’t do it at all. But I thought I got it to do it once, but maybe that was the other computer…
We’re talking basic stuff here. A drop down (or radio buttons to pick filename/contents/both). Click on a column to sort it how hard is that? There are a variety of shortcuts related to it (buried in the help) but they need a button in the find window to easily get you to them. That searching inside every file has got to be great for my battery life…
If you use the spotlight icon (upper right corner) and pick “show all” you can get close to what I’m looking for related to the sorting but it’s not a normal user interface.
Like I said, I’ve been testing it out and it’s never made me feel it’s an improvement, I feel like it’s devolved. It’s got good brains behind it but a lousy user interface…
I don’t like how the Spotlight “find” and the “Apple-F” find are different. One doesn’t allow sort, the other makes it difficult to know where the files are without clicking the “info” dot.
But you can limit searches to filenames only by putting the search term in quotes. It seems to work most of the time, though it overlooks files that used to turn up for me, so I have no idea what’s going on.
There’s a search thing called EasyFind that my husband says is pretty good, or you could always run Sherlock in Classic…
This is good, I was afraid I was gonna get jumped on for overlooking something ultra-obvious.
I mean it’s still bad, but at least I’m not ranting about something imaginary…
HoudahSpot
I’ve complained before about the “find’ options in Tiger so I had to give this a try. It’s got options for and and not and or and Venn diagrams to help you choose. It’s got previews for audio, video and photos (with all sorts of info on the files). Try it out today, it’ll be cheap or free…
Google Desktop released for Apple Macintosh
So they released Google Desktop for Macintosh. It’s the Google search application for desktops and since I don’t like Spotlight I can’t wait to see what…