Saturday, April 30, 2005
Tiger: Impressively Flawed
So I've been playing with Tiger (Mac OS 10.4) for the last month or
so in the form of a late beta and for the last 2 days in the form of
the final version. It's an impressive piece of software, but it
missed the mark badly in a lot of UX (User Experience) details.
First and foremost: Why the hell are their multiple ways of
searching?
This is from the Mac Help application about refining you search:
- Use the + character to find only the pages that include all the
words you enter. For example, searching for "video + sound" only
finds pages that include both words.
- Use the ! character immediately before a word to exclude pages that
contain that word. For example, searching for "video !sound" finds
only the pages with the word "video" that don't have the word
"sound." If a page has both words, it doesn't appear in the results.
- Use parentheses to group words. Searching for "(video + movies) !
sound" finds only the pages that include both "video" and "movies,"
but don't have the word "sound."
- Use the | character to find topics with any word you enter. The
search "(video | movies) !sound" finds topics that include either
video or movies, but don't have the word sound.
Why the hell doesn't this work in Spotlight?
So the biggest question is this: Spotlight the search mechanism can
handle boolean logic (AND OR NOT) just fine - Why the hell can't I
specify it in some easy to use way? I can think of dozens of ways of
representing this...
Secondly: Why do my smart folders have a .savedsearch extension? I
find it very weird - conceptually, Apple is telling me that this is a
folder. Why do I see an extension?
More to come...
