After several months, I remain underwhelmed with Spotlight - but hopeful of improvements it could learn from a System 7, 15 year old program.

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After several months, I remain underwhelmed with Spotlight - but hopeful of improvements it could learn from a System 7, 15 year old program.

Date Created: 09 Dec, 2005, 01:04 AM

Yesterday, I wrote an email to the committee of my local state psychological society branch following our collective receipt of an email containing Microsoft Word documents.

The sender, a member of the committee responsible for correspondence handling, had sent the same email with its attachments a second time, just a few minutes after the first had been sent, asking recipients to ignore the first and attend to the contents of the second.

The problem? The first contained Word documents with the infamous "Track Changes" switched on, such that the to-ing and fro-ing between the emailer and another was there for all to see. And naively, he had given us a "heads-up" telling us this was the reason he had sent the second email, and please ignore the first.

"Track Changes" are a great collaboration tool, and I have been sent book chapters to help edit and review and so understand the process.

The potential for real embarassment if not legal liability with Word (its has metadata embedded in most docs. which can also reveal more than the author intended) has been bothering me for some time now that Word seems to have become the default communication medium within email. It's one thing for Joe Public to believe that Windows is the only show in town, but quite another for all to be consequently compelled to use Word to be part of the communication community of practice.

So I wrote an email to all the committee pleading with them to stop using Word within email, and specifying my reasons, which have been discussed elsewhere by many others. Richard Stallman in particular offers Open Source-based arguments skewering the "secretiveness" of Microsoft code, but also offers a series canned replies to anyone who sends a Word attachment. See here for yourself.

Two things seemed to take some respondents by surprise: that Word documents often contain metadata which makes them 3 or more times the size they need to be when compared solely to text, and, that they can be the carriers of viruses. With so many psychologists still on dialup, receiving 800kb files containing 27kb of readbale text starts to drain the bandwidth, not to mention small mail inboxes.

So I suggested that worthwhile content can always be handled as text within email, and that pdf files can always been used if diagrams or formatting are important. Mind you, no one appointed Adobe as the official internet portable document supplier. Those on the Windows platform usually have to pay for the privilege of creating pdf docs, while Mac users have it built into the OS so it's a free option for us.

What I also don't want to have to do is be forced to open Word when I search my emails for attachment contents. I just want to be able to access the email to see the text content.

This desire highlights one of Spotlight's serious shortcomings. While it's now helpful to locate the source of a word, phrase, clause or sentence, I don't want to have to go through numerous extra steps to see if it's the one document or email I want to open. This is especially so if the email is part of a thread requoting previous emails. So the same clause might be highlighted as appearing in five or six email messages, when I might want the original. So I have the extra step of sorting by date, or sender or some other characteristic. It's nice to have the flexibility, but still misses the essence of what I'm after.

In other words, Spotlight often acts like Google, returning accurate but superfluous results when I know I only want one. If Spotlight allowed me to look inside the document when highlighting it, my problem would be solved. I oculd just copy-and-paste and save a few steps. Why must I open numerous Word documents to identify just the one I want?

Moreover, I can't search emails for the presence of attachments. It is not one of the search criteria Spotlight offers. So, when Spotlight returns results of email searches, it doesn't report if it contains any attachments. Again, I have to go to Mail and look at each one (or make sure the "attachment" icon is switched on) when it would be just as easy for the same icon to appear in Spotlight to clue me in.

An early System 9 application from the UK called ~~Ultramind~~ UltraFind allowed me to peek inside documents, after it had performed a global search. I still have it operating on my now ancient Power Computing clone which I use if someone foolishly sends me a floppy. (Not even my Windows box has a floppy) But don't go looking for it on Google, as you'll get some nonsense mind-control links.

[Update: Commenter Steve Samuels points out that the Classic app. I was thinking of was indeed UltraFind! Here's a link to see screenshots of its interface, and here is where it's currently available for System 9 users. It's development stopped when OS X was released in 2001.

Also, Will Volnak, of Copernican Technologies (wasn't there a DevonThink-like app called Copernicus for OS 9?) wrote to me asking that I should look at his information management application called Boswell, now in V.4 for OS X. I will download the demo and have a close look. It sells for US99, so that price might be a deal breaker for me. I'll look arround and see how it compares to other "thinking apps for the Mac".]

On the Mac OS X, another application exists to peek inside docs. without opening them, and which has the added bonus of doing this even for corrupted files in Windows formats. This is Abbott Systems' CanOpener which I find indispensable in certain situations. I used this also in OS 9, and it has made the transition to OS X, although it gets very little mention. The transition wasn't perfect however. Clicking on the CanOpener's menu link to its webpage sees it trying to open Internet Explorer in OS 9!

CanOpener allows you to look inside a wide range of docs., including attachments in Mail, once you locate the file: user/library/mail downloads. You can see text, pictures, even Quicktime movies and hear sounds.

It won't let you see inside pdfs (unlike Spotlight), and more modern Mac software such as the iWork package and Powerpoint.

So it seems to be that if technology which started with OS 7 - yes, 7 - can allow you to peek inside files without having to open them, then a 2005 technology like Spotlight should at the least be able to do this too.

It's one thing to locate a file or a word in a file, but another thing to then have to go open up its app. to actually read the content. Let's hope 2006 sees some important upgrades to what is potentially a killer app within OS X.