Shining the spotlight on Spotlight
One of OS X's most-touted new features is Spotlight, the system-wide tool designed to help stop your data from playing hide-and-seek. Spotlight resides in the top right corner of the menu bar, and also functions in many programs, including Mail, the Finder, and Address Book. Third-parties can tap into an API to include the power of Spotlight in their applications.
In theory, Spotlight is brilliant. After some time to index the hard drives in the machine, Spotlight can help you find the oldest, obscurest information buried in the confines of today's huge hard drives. That's the theory, anyway. Despite that, and after having used it for a couple of months now (I had a seed key for testing the developer builds), I'm still undecided about the helpfulness of Spotlight.
There are some things it does well -- it clearly makes it much easier to find the proverbial needle in the haystack that is your hard drive. It makes it really simple to look at all the cool things in the System folder. Select that folder in the Finder, then run a Finder search on kind:images within that folder, for instance. It will theoretically help me find long-lost documents as long as I can remember some snippet of text that was in them. All of these are good things, and for these, I'm thankful.
However, from my perspective, Spotlight has a number of issues that very much give it the feeling of a "version 0.95 release." Read on to see the things that make me question Spotlight's completeness...