Comments on: Microsoft steals the spotlight!

By: Arlen

Arlen — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

One gripe about Spotlight: it can’t find medial strings–only initial strings. So if I have a file called sofaulove.doc, typing “ofaulove” won’t find it. CHEESY.

Dashboard IS cool, but on my G3 700mHz, it runs like a dead dog. I swear–I hit F12 and it’s a good 30 seconds before the widgets are all active. So I don’t use them much.

If you know of any good Spotlight training sites, do tell. I mean, it is super-easy to use, but I suspect there are search delimiters you can type into the command line to narrow your results. Yes, I have read the Help file . . .

By: Joe

Joe — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

hmm.. That’s interesting, I haven’t had that problem, and I’ll have to try it when I get home. But I did jsut try that same experiement on the Windows Desktop Search on my work laptop and it did as you suggested. Maybe that’s the nature of indexing searches? Looks like an enhancement is needed.

By: Joe

Joe — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

On dashboard… yeah, the dashboard app itself takes very little memory, it’s the widgets that take up the resources. And when you first call up a dashboard full of widgets all of the data in them needs to load from the various sources, but subsequent call-ups of the dashboard should be a lot faster. It takes some time to get them all up when you have a lot of them. I can’t imagine what it’s like on a G3. If you haven’t maxed out the memory in that thing, I’d do that when you can.

By: Joe

Joe — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

A, there’s a thread here that answers your questions… it’s possible to search partial words in spotlight. There’s a couple of different ways to do it.

By: Arlen

Arlen — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Yes, Dashboard does show up a lot faster on subsequent launches. But I haven’t found much occasion to use it, just yet. One really cool thing, though, is that it has a whole offline dictionary. Very useful when you don’t want the ridiculously selective definitions offered by the MS Word dictionary.

That thread looks good–answers a lot of questions. And confirms that a lot of functionality is missing from the quick toolbar (though it’s present in the more laborious “Find” function).

By: Jason

Jason — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

When I read something like “It even integrates a bit more into the operating system”. I can’t help but think “Great, so when Desktop Search goes down, it takes the kernel with it.”
Feh, 2000 and XP have actually been pretty well rock solid for me. I just like to complain. I guess I picked up that stupid attitude ever since I started dual booting with Linux. (lotta good it does me. Wine schmine. It ain’t compatible with jack shiznit. Just kinda fun to mess with.)