Why Apple Should Reinvent SpotLight

There's no doubt that launchers are a great thing: instead of moving you mouse or right-clicking, you can simply use your keyboard to perform actions.



There's Mozilla Ubiquity, this amazing extension everyone's talking about which allows you to create your own shortcuts to browse the web "faster and smarter"; there's QuickSilver, a lightweight Mac app which is very useful in order to launch applications in about 2 seconds; then, there's Apple's Spotlight.

Spotlight allows you to find anything on your Mac: from files to applications, you can just launch it via keyboard shortcut and start searching. But there's a big problem in my opinion: interface.
I mean, it's a column.

While Spotlight shows a great potential in finding stuff, it surely lacks in user interface experience, presenting its results in way-too-simple column view which should enable the users to distinguish files from directories. Sure. There are some preferences, this is true, but even if you restrict your Spotlight settings to Apps, Folders and Documents, there's still this ugly list view which is so old.

So what should Apple do to improve Spotlight? I think that together with vertical space, Spotlight should use horizontal space as well: instead of having dozens of results in a vertical display (Documents is under Applications which is under Top Hit which is under Show All) it could put Categories in a horizontal view  and then the results under each categories so that we could have a quick glimpse of all the things we have found instead of having to look at the bottom of the list.

Anyway we'll know more in a few days with WWDC. Let's hope Spotlight will be reinvented.

This guest post was written by MacStories.net

MacStories.net is a website and blog dedicated to Mac news, reviews, and tutorials. A multi-launguage website, both in English and Italian. Yeah, I love Mac users.

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