“If you’re part of the ‘other 90 percent,’ you might have had a bit of Mac envy if you read my recent review of Apple’s new Tiger operating system. Windows users take heart. All is not lost,” Larry Magid writes for CBS News. “I praised Apple’s new Spotlight feature that allows users to quickly find any file, email message, contact, image or application based on any word or phrase contained in the document.”
“I pointed out that there are a number of Windows programs that perform similar functions but added, ‘because Spotlight is integral to the Mac operating system, it is not only faster than those Windows add-on products; it’s also more elegant and easier to use.’ What I wrote was true, but just because the PC products aren’t quite as good as what is now available for the Mac, doesn’t mean they aren’t worth trying out,” Magid writes.
Magid then covers Google search and Copernic in a sad (if you’re a Windows-only user) article designed to help Windows users attempt to “be like a Mac,” just as Windows itself strives so hard, but fails so miserably, to do. Which might have been Magid’s point all along.
Magid concludes, “while none of these programs is quite as good as Apple’s Spotlight, they’re all pretty good which, considering the price, isn’t so bad. Of course, Microsoft plans to offer a well-integrated desktop search program in the next version of Windows, but don’t search for a copy of that program anytime soon. It’s not scheduled to be released until Christmas 2006.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: This is the funniest article we’ve read in quite some time. This piece for Windows patchers ought to have been titled “Bondo for Windows!” and subtitled, “How to pretend you have Mac OS X Tiger’s Spotlight, just not as good (but you’re used to that).”
What about all the rest of Mac OS X Tiger? How can Windows users perform “similar functions,” but with slower, inelegant, and harder-to-use solutions?
We’ve got some real news for Windows users. Contrary to what Magid writes, all actually is lost. Enough already! You can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear. Get a Mac. Don’t you deserve the best? Are you somehow unworthy of having the world’s most advanced operating system? If it makes you feel better, just add a Mac to your computing arsenal – it’ll talk to your Windows PC just fine. You can decide later if you feel like continuing to use the Windows PC anymore. Just stop trying to fake it to save three bucks, it’s pitiful.
For more information about smoothly adding a safe, secure, powerful, and fun Mac OS X machine to your computing arsenal, please click here. For inexpensive entry to the Mac platform, you might want to take a look at Apple’s new Mac Mini which starts at just US$499 — it just might be the perfect machine for you. And don’t forget to order it with 512MB RAM, you’ll want it.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Apple unveils new faster iMac G5 line with built-in AirPort Extreme, Bluetooth, 512MB base RAM, more – May 03, 2005
The Independent: Apple’s ‘faster, smarter, simpler’ Mac OS X Tiger ‘a must-have’ – May 04, 2005
Jupiter Research VP: Apple’s Mac OS X Tiger ‘runs rings around Microsoft Windows’ – May 04, 2005
Mac OS X Tiger review for a Windows PC audience finds Tiger’s ‘far, far better than Windows XP’ – May 03, 2005
Longhorn mentioned in nearly every Apple Mac OS X Tiger review to assuage Windows masses – May 02, 2005
Boston Herald: Mac OS X Tiger should compel Windows PC users to think about switching to Apple Mac – May 02, 2005
Mac OS X Tiger will likely improve performance of your Macintosh – April 30, 2005
PC World review gives Apple’s Mac OS X Tiger 4.5 stars out of 5 – April 30, 2005
Ars Technica: Mac OS X Tiger ‘at least twice as significant as any single past update’ – April 28, 2005
BusinessWeek: ‘Tiger bolsters Mac OS X’s edge as the best personal-computer operating system around’ – April 28, 2005
Associated Press: Mac OS X Tiger ‘provides another excellent incentive to switch from Windows’ – April 28, 2005
Mossberg: Apple’s Tiger ‘the best, most advanced personal computer operating system on the market’ – April 28, 2005
InformationWeek columnist: Apple’s Mac OS X Tiger ‘a compelling upgrade’ – April 28, 2005
NY Times: Apple’s Mac OS X Tiger is the most secure, stable and satisfying OS on earth – April 28, 2005
Wired News: Apple’s Mac OS X Tiger ‘full of welcome surprises’ – April 27, 2005
Spotlight is the most amazing piece of operating system software yet created… for me to POOP ON!!!
Yeh-hehh-hessss!!!!
“You can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear.”
I don’t have anything to add to that.
Dude, really — you don’t even do me well.
Get back to the coat check.
Being a windows user is the same thing as jumping over a $100 bill to save a penny! Idiots!
Good one, Andrew, hadn’t heard that one before.
I do you pretty good… every night, ball breath.
Yeh-heh-hesss you do Spe, yes you do.
May I poop on you? Glass bottom boat?
“And in next week’s article we will be learning how to build a mobile phone from two empty plastic-cups connected with a string…”
I can turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse, just ask your girlfriend.
mw: ready…need I say more!
SPeaking of Spotlight, it doesn’t seem to be indexing my entire external hard drive. I’ve forced it to index three times now, and still am not getting all the results I should be. Anyone else having this issue?
So the problem with google desktop search is that it isn’t integrated with the os, “elegant”, or cost anything? LOL it “just works”, after the indexing, which isn’t invasive. So I have to pay $129 for a feature for my mac mini that I get for free on all my wintels.
That makes NO sense.
I expected Spotlight to be good, just not this good. The first search I ran actually found the word typed into a layer in a Photoshop file! That is efficiency!
Get a clue joe. Go run your wintels and I will save my breath.
Joe,
The Magid article doesn’t describe Google Search as equal to Spotlight. It calls it substandard to Spotlight. Therefore it’d be perfect for Windows users who are already used to “substandard as standard” anyway.
What about all the rest of Tiger’s features, as MDN asks? How are you going to poorly simulate them on the backwards, woefully behind, Windows XP platform?
MDN says it best, “Enough already! You can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear. Get a Mac.”
better “simulation” spend 499 on a mini!
“I have to pay $129 for a feature for my mac mini that I get for free on all my wintels.
That makes NO sense.”
If that were true it wouldn’t, personally I use copernic on my PC, and although pretty good, it just doesn’t come close to Spotlight, they aren’t even in the same league.
Try this in google joe;
Download a PDF say a Map of your city then type your street name see what results you get from the search.
Now type that with Spotlight…..
Amazing
Not to grant anything to Windows, but guess what’s on display in one of the Ripley’s Believe It or Not museums?
MDN MW “known”. As in someone should have known about Ripley’s sow’s ear silk purse, before uttering the old cliche.
Joe, Google indexing is like all passive indexing. They get out of date.
Spotlight doesn’t.
Google indexing is nothing more what Mac OS had since OS 8, ie, index your HD and provide you search result based on the static index. After a while it is useless.
That is, Windows finally got a Mac OS version after years time.
You have to wait many more years to get something like Spotlight. Google just gives you Mac OS 8 indexing feature.
Enjoy pre-history.
And before someone says “Google indexes often so not to be THAT out of date” the reply is YAHWNN, so did indexing of OS 8. Nothing new.
Spotlight goes through the kernel, the thing is real time. Set a spotlight search for “Bubbalukkkabooo” to fill a smart folder, get a new file in textedit, type Bubbalukkkabooo and save it. BAM it gets in the smart folder.
With Google Desktop you have to wait for the next indexing process, just like Mac OS 8 did. Welcome to pre-history Joe. Was about time.
Windows users will drive 5 miles to save a penny on a gallon of gas.
From the article: “Indexing is a relatively intense process so if an index is in progress, your PC could be pretty sluggish. To get around that, the programs suspend the indexing if you do anything at your PC, such as moving the mouse or typing at the keyboard. “
As IT_guy says, we had this with Mac OS 8 already. Boy, it took all those years for Windows to catch up with … OS 8.
ROFLMAO
HUHAHAOHOHHOHOHUHOAHAHAHAHHAUHAOHUHEUAHAHEOUHH
Brought tears to my eyes
UHIHUEHOHOHAHUHHOEIHUOEEHUIOEHU
AND, as it was pointed out, Spotlight can give you a PDF map as a result of “New York” and that map happens to cover that area.
Google desktop (and Mac OS 8) could not find that for you.
Citing again: “My other favorite free desktop search program is from Copernic. Like Yahoo, it places an optional search bar in the lower right corner of the screen where you can quickly type in a word or phrase you’re seeking. With Copernic, you have to specify whether you’re looking for a word in an email, file, contact, music, picture or video while Yahoo displays all the information automatically. “
Oh my, this is again Mac OS 8 indexing. So you have to type a word contained in the file, whatever you are looking for.
Know what? Spotlight goes beyond that. You are not limited to a ‘word’ physically contained into a file. Again, welcome to Mac OS 8 (for that feature that is) Windozers.
“So, while none of these programs is quite as good as Apple’s Spotlight, they’re all pretty good which, considering the price, isn’t so bad. Of course, Microsoft plans to offer a well-integrated desktop search program in the next version of Windows, but don’t search for a copy of that program anytime soon. It’s not scheduled to be released until Christmas 2006. “
Oh my, oh my. So sad. Those program as probably as good as indexing in Mac OS 8. Sooooo old.
This is grand: “The Google Desktop full text indexes:
Text files, Microsoft Word documents, Excel workbooks, and PowerPoint presentations living on your hard drive
Email handled through Outlook or Outlook Express
AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) conversations
Web pages browsed in Internet Explorer
Additionally, any other files you have lying about–photographs, MP3s, movies–are indexed by their filename. So while the Google Desktop can’t tell a portrait of Uncle Alfred (uncle_alfred.jpg) from a song by “Uncle Cracker” (uncle_cracker__double_wide__who_s_your_uncle.mp3), it’ll file both under “uncle.”
LOL, not as good as Spotlight? Not as good as Mac OS 8 indexing: it would have told the difference and find you Uncle Alfred.
Sorry Windozers, not even on par with Mac OS 8. Try again.
Joe,
While I like your politics, your concern about the price of Spotlight is a bit myopic. The $129 (actually, you can get it for $79 in several places online) is to buy THE WHOLE OS not just Spotlight. It might actually be the FREE part of the OS. RSS, iChatAV, Mail, Dashboard, QT, Automator, etc. are what you are paying the $79 for.
I remember once what an Apple rep told me after hearing one of my clients complain about the one button mouse, “Feel free to go out and pick up any mouse you like, Apple throws the one button into the box for free.”
For Joe and the other intellectually honest PC users out there I can only say this. Now is the time to really make the switch. Panther was very good. Tiger is amazing. It is the OS that all of us have been looking for since the early days of the groundbreaking Amiga OS. We finally get a mature, adult GUI OS for the first time ever on any platform. XP is so last decade. Time to moveon.
-B
iPodder, if accurate, tells me things about Spotlight that the article didn’t, and the article is to what I responded to earlier. The usual cacophony erupts after any divergence from the cult line is made by myself or another, most of the noise from people who obviously didn’t read the article.
Spotlight does sound better than Google Desktop search, which still has the advantage of being free, and, to anyone with a triple digit IQ, adequate.
I do really want to read this back to all of you after the next $130 iteration of osX, to which all of you will scurry like bugs to flame.
Hey Beeble, right back at ya! I did already switch, with my moms computer and wifey’s mini, , both of which purchases I shared with the crowd here, but I will be damned if I am going to get excited about Tiger.
Oh, BTW I won’t get excited about longhorn either. I will be using my original windows 2000 until it dies, and the dozens of others I have shared it with probably will as well.
Joe,
Using the girl’s Macs while you stick with Win2000 doesn’t really count as a switch in my book
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But glad to hear you are activly dabbling! Let us know when you get that Powerbook!
-B
P.S. I would have welcomed a truly redesigned Windows product. Win users deserve better that what they are getting. But alas, that ol’ user base is an anchor that Redmond will not soon shed. Their success as a software giant is the very thing that is keeping them from really moving their OS into the 21st century.
Joe, iPodder is about right I’d say.
Spotlight uses kernel integrated *listeners* that makes so that in never gets outdate and always reflects the status of your system.
Not only, it uses an extendable metadata system so that you may add metadata to your files so to find them with the most uncommon search.
Finally, if you really are interested, read the ArsTechnica report on Tiger by John Siracusa, it covers Spotlight well and disclose what marvels it is able to do:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars
Nothing to do with Google Desktop or old Mac OS 8 and on indexing features.
The other thing that is bound to make waves later is Automator, especially when Apple will add additional actions to applications (and other 3rd parties). Well covered again by Siracusa.
Other drooling thing is the integrated IDE, with Xcode and Shark. This last is a true jem. Amazing. But you have to be in the sw development business to appreciate, and of course the 64-bit support. This machines with Panther made already a dent in the academic/scientific institutions. Tiger will be a big plus.
Dashboard, cute, nice and dandy. Useful even but I would not drool on those… yet?
Beeble, pretty much so. Microsoft is rooted in the past and has such a large professional and corporate base that it would be killed and out of business in few days if they dared to break backward compatibility as Apple did with Tiger.
They are simply too big to truly innovate. They mostly are bound to desktop eye candies and leave everything else untouched.
Looks like they are now suffering from their own weight.
Longhorn good features have been cut due to their potential risk of cutting ties with the past. Can’t do. Scrap them out. You really believe with the developers base they have that it is due to time? I’d say it is due to corporate pressures: “Billy, do that in Longhorn and we might just consider switching to another OS. If you give another OS where we have to migrate too, why not migrate to Linux or OS X. Think about it Billy. Your call now”
sorry, not “as Apple did with Tiger” but – of course – “as Apple did with OS X”.
MDN’s take was classic! “Just stop trying to fake it to save three bucks, it’s pitiful.” LOL
Seahawks insights are in keeping with my own long-held opinion WRT Microsoft. This is why I eschew the language of “M$ is crap” and “Bill Gates is the Devil” kind of talk. Microsoft can afford to hire any programmer it wants to and often it does. These people are not stupid, they could make Windows a truly great OS if they were allowed to. But herein likes the rub.
Some programming group in Redmond comes up with some cool new innovative idea for Windows that will leapfrog OS X and then are shot down because it breaks too many pieces of code elsewhere (either inside of Windows or in client software). This probably goes on day after day until finally, the really creative software engineers grow weary and either do the best non-creative programming they can or leave for more interesting pastures (such as One Infinity Loop).
This is Microsoft’s lot in life. It will always (until their competitors have whittled them down to a 10% market share) have to deal with the fact that it really cannot change that much for fear of catapulting itself off of some economic cliff.
The unfortunate thing is not that Microsoft builds only adequate software but that there are so many people who don’t really need to run their software. Sure, there is a certain part of the computer using public which MUST use Windows because it is the only tool available. But how large is this number. Having been in the computing support biz for nearly 18 years, I would wager that this number is only around 25% of computer users. For everyone else, there are comparable or much higher quality apps available on OS X and Linux.
So really, the reason that Microsoft is unable to innovate is not their fault but that of their user base, 75% of whom do not need to struggle with the mediocrity that is Windows. The irony is that the average, uniformed computer user (the one who thinks that Office only runs on Windows or that the best OS for doing digital video editing is Windows) drags down the innovative opportunities for Microsoft so much that it can’t adequately meet the needs of those PC users who MUST run Windows.
If I were a Windows power user who had to be wedded to the platform because of some unique need unavailable on OS X I would be conflicted. The ignorant masses (and all of us are ignorant in some area of life, no?) would be better served by OS X while I, as a Win user would be better served if Microsoft were more nimble. On the other hand, the Win power user probably could not abide a Apple getting a larger market share…
It’s a nasty conundrum.
P.S. MDN, whatever happened to the preview mode for posting? I would like to be able to review whether I said something like “Apple” vs. “a Apple” before submitting.
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MW: “Reading”, as in, I’d like to be reading my finished posts before everyone else.
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