The Spotlight

I have been using my MacBook for over 6-months now. I guess I consider myself a veteran user of the Mac since I use it on a daily basis. One feature that I have come to depend on and like very much is Spotlight. All I can say is wow!

There really is no analogy to this in Windows. The closest thing I can think of is Google Desktop or Yahoo! Desktop Search add-ons to Windows. Spotlight is really impressive and well integrated into Mac OS X (10.4 Tiger). It is very intuitive and just works just like my kitchen refrigerator. I think Microsoft copied this in Windows Vista. I have used the Search feature in Vista and unless you have more than 1GB RAM and the fastest processor available today, it runs somewhat sluggish in my experience. Anyway, back to Spotlight.

Spotlight is designed intuitively and never intrudes on my computing experience. If you are still sitting on the sidelines and thinking about getting Mac, this is yet another innovation that non-technical users will use often. One thing I like about it is that I can find all instances of any words or phrases that are anywhere on my MacBook just about instantaneously. This includes inside of documents (pdf, odt, txt, html, etc) that are on my MacBook. Since it is well integrated into the OS, it just works.