N. B. This site will probably be down a bit this weekend. I'm changing ISPs (ditching Speakeasy DSL for Comcast business cable Internet).

Re: Tiger pet peeves

There are 6 messages in this thread, displayed in the order they were posted.

Christopher Hansen 5/20/2005 5:50:51 AM Pacific

I never have gotten the hang of this in other applications. As you noted about Tiger's Finder, some applications, especially text editors, extend the selection differently. It even seems that some applications are not internally consistent, sometimes extending the top and sometimes extending the bottom of the selection. Is there a behavioral pattern I'm missing here?

Jaddie

5/20/2005 6:34:39 AM Pacific

I agree with you about Spotlight.
It feels like I can't tame it. I want a simpler Find mechanism.
Spotlight feels very "forced" and Windows-like to me. The default Find mechanism should be to find files and folders whose name contains the specified characters.
I hope Matt (of macjournals.com fame, for those who might not know) will cast some light on the spot of my displeasure with Tiger.
And I don't need no stinkin' Spotlight thingee in the menu bar. And while I'm at it, I don't need no stinkin' Version Cue thingee up there, either (of course, that's fairly simple to disable).
--Jaddie

Nat Irons

5/21/2005 5:41:52 PM Pacific

The Finder thing is a huge drag. I cordoned off a few folders containing gigabytes of raw XML from spotlight and then found I couldn't filter them in the Finder. I wound up using 'find $PWD | grep foo', pretty much the definition of failure.

Jerry Kindall

5/21/2005 6:20:18 PM Pacific

Much to my dismay, I discovered last night that it is impossible to script the creation of a "smart folder" or even to open a previously-created smart folder from AppleScript (after tweaking the XML of the query via script). I was trying to write an AppleScript to replicate the old-style filtering but I'm completely flummoxed. There's also an FXScript key in the XML file that must be set to a particular magic number (which I suspected at first to be the inode number of the folder to be searched, but does not in fact seem to be). If it is not, the smart folder, after having its XML edited, reverts to searching the boot drive... there's simply no way around Spotlight.

Jerry Kindall

5/21/2005 6:22:48 PM Pacific

The Spotlight menu item, by the way, can be disabled by renaming Search.bundle in /System/Library/CoreServices.

Jerry Kindall

5/21/2005 6:24:39 PM Pacific

Oh, and if you really want to see some bizarre Finder behavior in Tiger, try selecting by typeahead in a folder containing 3,000 or so items sorted by Date Modified. Geez.

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Re: Tiger pet peeves