“I’m a slob in the real world but easily qualify for the Good Housekeeping Seal when it comes to keeping things straight inside my computer. I can find almost any file within seconds, even if it’s one I haven’t used in a while. When it comes to locating a picture, I’m better than the average librarian. So I have a completely straight face as I tell you I can help you better organize your data. On my own computer, I create separate folders for almost any topic. My file names tell me what’s in the file and also include the date the file was created,” Bill Husted writes for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Husted goes on and on describing how users should manually organize their dinosaur Windows PCs. We’re not kidding, this is an article dated May 15, 2005! What a purely stupid waste of time! It’s actually funny and sad at the same time.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: This article is obviously for Windows PC users and describes the old way to use a personal computer. There is a new way, where the user isn’t forced to artificially organize their computer, just so they can find things. Using this new way, the computer does what it’s supposed to do; it makes your life easier. You could theoretically store everything you own in one gigantic folder that you’ll never even open. How? It’s called Spotlight and it’s built into Apple’s Mac OS X Tiger. It has begun to change the way people use computers. As usual, Mac users have it already while Windows users will have to wait years.
Find out more about Apple’s Spotlight and how it changes personal computing here. Watch a QuickTime movie of Spotlight in action here.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Columnist: ‘PC users have had what Apple Macs offer for years and it all makes me vaguely sad’ – May 17, 2005
What Zeal MDN!
you can imagine.. MDN probably started reading this thinking it was ABOUT Spotlight.. then burst out laughing when they found it was a guy who was being serious… talking about his organization skills…
Okay.. willing to figure out MHz Myth? nope..
Spend upwards of $2000 to play video games on a 17″ screen? Hell Yeah!
Willing to manually organize anywhere from 40-160GB of data? Sure..
PC users are so confusing..
Well, having SpotLight is very handy indeed, yet I am certainly not going to do away with saving my files with a sensible name in a sensible place! Saving everything on the desktop, even on a Mac with Spotlight is clumsy!
And the beauty of spotlight is that it will only get better – it will no doubt get faster, offer better search options/queries, have improved search results (ie results have their colour labels and are more like they look in finder.) and as more applications take advantage of the addition of metadata and we start adding it ourselves our results will get better and better.
Used in conjunction with something like Quicksilver it’s a boon.
Also, irrespective of having spotlight or not why does this guy need to use a filename structure to work out when a file was created? Just look at the created date of the file1 Interestingly you can also see when a file was last modified by looking at the last modified date.
If Spotlight is as good as its advanced billing portends it to be, can it help me find all those lost days, nights and weeks when I should have been studying at college instead of partying?
THEN I’ll sing the praises of Spotlight at the top of my lungs in the middle of Redmond, WA.
The power of Spotlight is not because it does away with the need to organize your files. Organization is always important (especially in a corporate environment) regardless of how efficient the search feature is.
M.X.N.T.4.1,
Regarding naming files with dates, it can be very useful to include appropriate dates within the file name. For example, your iPhoto folder names are based on dates. Sometimes it’s easier to sort through files when the date is included in the name, especially if you don’t want to view the file created date or if you pass those files to someone else. Or if you have multiple files for several different dates that have the same filename, you can keep the same name but also add the date to keep the filenames unique but also useful.
But…this new way is only since Tiger…how long has that been?
I think MDN is being a little too over zealous.
Kool,
you don’t have to keep things on your desktop with Spotlight. (I’ve never had anything on my desktop since I’ve been using OS X)
Spotlight means you can get away from the heirachical file system, or as you paraphrase it, a sensible name in a sensible place.
You can forget all that now! It takes a bit of a mental leap – but it’s worth the try.
Spotlight is a massive paradigm shift. It will take awhile for most to realize what a change it brings. Windows is clearly a dinosaur. MDN obviously clearly sees what a change Spotlight provides – it’ll be awhile before many understand. I threw all of my files into a single folder last week. No organization necessary – Spotlight handles it all now!
I’m an old dinousar mac tiger user anyway
Does anyone out there miss the “old” search function in Panther’s Mail like I do? Maybe I am missing something, but I liked being able to specify a mailbox, and what type of content I was searching for within that mailbox (or mailboxes). Like only searching the “From” field for a name. Having to search through everything seems like a big step backward… and at the moment it seems slower!
Am I missing the easy way to do this still? Help!
maybe it’s just me, but the idea of throwing everything into one folder, all willy nilly and that, seems really stupid. maybe it’s because i do a lot of print, motion and video design and work at a printing company, but i like things to be organized into their appropriate folders instead of looking all over the place. i don’t even need to open spotlight up and i already know where something is. i must be in the minority, but i can’t really say i find creating and naming new folders to keep things organized such a tyranical burden.
rick,
You’re stuck with stale thinking. Think outside the box, dude. I you really use Spotlight, you’ll begin to understand.
izod,
Search for your term and click the “From” button that pops up above the search results pane. There are also “Entire Message,” “To,” “Subject” and other options to specify mailboxes available. Click “Save” to create a Smart Mailbox that will keep track of everything matching your search. For example, if you want all messages from “Mike Smith,” Search for “Mike Smith,” click “From,” click Save and all messages from “Mike Smith” will be in that new Smart mailbox you’ve saved. And new messsages will be automatically added to that Smart Mailbox. It’s very powerful stuff!
izod those options are still there, they appear after you have punched in your search term, just under the delete/junk/send buttons. This makes sense to me since you don’t need them until you are actually looking for something.
You can still sort based on sender, subject or entire message. To sort by specific mailboxes just click on them in the left hand pane before your search. It took me a couple of tries to get used to it over the old system but it now makes much more sense.
I still get lots of beachballs on my Powerbook when sending mail in 2.0 though, which is a nuisance.
Spotlight does not help if you give your files random names as we do for our website.
Check out a jpg from amazon or other big website…
for example here is powermac at amazon- the file name:
B0007OW502.01._SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg
We give random names so to make it harder for people to link to or search for graphic files on websites.
Rick,
There’s nothing wrong with your view towards files and folders, in fact, it’s actually a wise view. In a corporate environment there is absolutely no way you’d get away with throwing all your files into one folder, and there’s good reason for that. The advantages of organization far outweigh the few seconds it takes to name and organize your files.
And I think that people that throw all their stuff into one folder will eventually have problems with that approach. What happens if you accidentally name or rename a file incorrectly? What if you share files with other people? What if you want to backup select files and folders? Maybe a file structure won’t be as important with Spotlight, but it is still a good practice to be organized. Go over to Apple headquarters and look at their file system. I bet you’re not going to see everything lumped into one folder.
Smart Folders is really the key that changes the way you interact with your computer. Being able to group files in different ways without changing the folder structure is actually very useful.
King Al,
Please give an example of how you name a file with dates on it.
Thanks
MDN is joking, yes?
Finding my collection of files in the folder I put them in is MUCH faster than programming some complex search into Spotlight, or sifting through a giant list of items returned by a broad search.
Spotlight is for when you don’t know where it is, not for creating a lazy-man’s burden.
RUMOR – Tiger 10.4.2 is going to put all the system files in one folder called “2400sdn340” buried twelve levels deep inside a folder marked “beward of the leopard,” and each file will be found by Spotlight and used that way.
Jeremy,
I was thinking more of how I incorporate dates into files that I work with at work. For example I have daily order entry reports that might be named something like ” daily order entry 20050517.txt”. Each month will have approximately 20 files, and since you can’t name them all with the same name, you might as well differentiate them with a date. All of those files would then go in a folder called something like “Daily Order Entry 2005-05” inside another folder for the entire year.
Sure, I could use Spotlight to try to find the specific file I want, but it seems just as quick to navigate to the correct folder since I know exactly where it will be.
“stuck with stale thinking”, eh? haha, yeah.
if you want to put everything into one folder and use spotlight to find everything, more power to you. but i agree that people who do this will run into serious problems down the line by taking a ‘dump it all in the junk drawer’ approach to using their computer. i can’t see how anyone using macs daily to make a living could do this and survive in business.
King,
That makes sense. Thanks.
I’d have to say you’re a fool to depend on Spotlight for organization. I’m juggling upwards of 200-300 individual files per week at work. If I dumped them all in one folder there’s no WAY I’d be able to keep track of what I’m doing. And I don’t buy the “stale thinking” argument. There’s a reason corporations tag everything with a job number or an inventory marker of some kind: it gives everyone involved a common point of reference. New technology is no substitute for common sense.