OSX Leopard to Feature a Massively Improved Spotlight
Computerworld is saying that OSX 10.5 Leopard will ship with dramtically improved Spotlight search technology. This is interesting to me because, so far, we haven’t heard much about it. From where I sit, Spotlight isn’t all that useful (its biggest weakness is application launching, and that’s why I still use Blacktree’s Quicksilver), but read on — some major things are about to get better.
- Remote Mac searching — Leopard’s Spotlight will allow users to search remote network-connected Macs for content. If you’re in bed looking for the picture you downloaded to your downstairs Mac, you’ll be able to do that with Leopard. While this is cool for home users, its real leverage lies in business environments, and Apple is building a Spotlight Server that will be bundled with Leopard Server to do exactly that.
- Parental snooping — an extension of traditional Spotlight searching that will allow parents to remotely search their kids’ computers to quickly analyze download and file activity.
- “Recent Items” feature — Leopard’s Spotlight will include a list of recent searches, so that if you’re in a workflow and you need to find a file (or files) more than once, you will have one-button access to them atop the Spotlight list. This makes perfect sense, as the “recent items” meme is found everywhere throughout OSX currently: the Apple menu, Finder, Quicktime and others. It makes perfect sense that Spotlight would have this.
- Boolean search capability –will allow more refined searches (which will especially be useful in a networked environment) via AND, OR and NOT boolean operators. So, for example, if you’re searching on “ice” but don’t want anything with “cream” included in your results, you can do that easily under Leopard’s Spotlight.
- Better application launching — this is the big one to me. Right now, let’s say you’re trying to launch Word. You open Spotlight, type word, and sure enough, Word is right up there as the top hit. But you have to arrow down to select Word, then hit return to invoke the launch command. In Leopard, the top hit will be implicit, meaning that if you type word and simply hit enter, your top hit will be launched with no further keystrokes being necessary. That’s awesome, and might be enough to get me off of Quicksilver.
- “Quick Look” capability — this has the potential to be almost Expose-like in its utility. What this allows is for you to scroll down a list of Spotlight results and get an immediate, full-size preview in a graphic overlay atop the rest of your screen. Sound boring? Think about it more: you have a list of 20 PDFs that are similarly named, and you’re looking for the one with the picture of a mountain on the first page. Today, you’d have to open each one in Preview to find the one you’re looking for. With Quick Look, a large CMD-Tab-style overlay (I’m thinking transparent black, sort of like iPhoto’s full-screen edit mode) will appear showing the actual content of the document. Quick Look will even play movie files right inside the Quick Look overlay. Oh, and you can do this with networked Macs too, thanks to #1, above.
What we have here is Spotlight 2.0, which is probably what Spotlight should have been in the first place. But Apple wanted to have a full metadata system-wide search capablity in place before Vista hit the shelves, so Spotlight debuted with Tiger. Now we see what it really can do, and it’s no coincidence that Apple is enhancing its search technology now that Vista is out and has a roughly comparable search capability built-in.
Apple has an official page about this here.
Technorati Tags: apple, osx, leopard, windows, vista
Err…if you want to use Spotlight to launch an app, you *don’t* have to scroll down to WORD. Just hold down command and hit enter.
OK, but that’s still another key combo you have to do. Smacking ENTER is just so quick and easy, and it doesn’t require two hands.
The gods live in the details of things like this.
Command + Enter doesn’t require two hands…it requires using your thumb on the Command Key and any other finger on your right hand to press Enter.
You do know that the Command Key is about 2 inches away from the enter key right?
Boolean capabilities suggest Spotlight in Leopard will actually find what I’m looking for. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had to use an alternate search tool to locate a file. It really looks bad when a half dozen freeware tools can find a file that Spotlight can’t.
David — I know. I like Spotlight — it’s years beyond what Windows XP offers — but I played with Vista’s search, and it’s roughly in the same league as Tiger’s. Leopard will introduce what Tiger’s Spotlight should have been.
If you use Word a lot, maybe put it in your dock Jeff – then no typing is required.
Cheers.
Pete — Word was just an example.
To boot, I keep as little as possible in my Dock, because I prefer Quicksilver for all app launching. It’s an amazing app.
My gripe is that Spotlight can’t search all files on the computer. It can’t search any hidden or system files (and sometimes it is just these I need to use) and there are only certain applications it can find things in eg Mozilla Thunderbird emails cannot be searched apparently.
I’ve never understood the difference between Quicksilver and Spotlight –only performance?
first of all, love your blog
spotlight is ok. actually some of the features meantioned above are already in linux’s Beagle.
weird. It never occurred to me to try anything as cumbersome as scrolling or typing command when I can just double click.
Kabish, Quicksilver can manipulate documents and do many more things than spotlight. It’s more a general productivity tool.
It’s a very extensible interface so it can do a lot, really. Watch a video tutorial on quicksilver, is my recommendation.
Kabish — as Paul says, app launching is only one thing QS does. It’s really an extensible framework that allows you to do pretty much anything you want on your Mac from your keyboard. It’s awesome.
I think I’ll stick with Quicksilver no matter what. I know I have not seen the capabilities of Leopard yet, but I’m assuming that they will not be so amazing to squash quicksilver.
Long Live Quicksilver.
wmcraver — the smart thing the Quicksilver kids did is make it more than a system search and app launcher. No matter where Apple takes Spotlight, the Quicksilver framework will live on.
I’d love to see Apple buy Quicksilver and roll it into OSX as a native technology. That’d be the way to roll.
I’m a PC user that wants to buy a Mac, but am waiting for Leopard. Assuming the March 24 date is bogus, what, realistically is the timeline between announcement and actual release. Presumably, if they wanted a March 24 release, they need to give themselves roughly a month?
Just curious what the trend was in the past. (Every other blog goes on WWDC, random anniversaries, etc. I was trying to look at this from a corrporate process standpoint.) Presumably, they don’t just announce they are shipping next week.