Maria’s Guides

• Mac Gems: Leopard’s first tweaks
  Excellent Macworld article covering software products you can use to improve Leopard. I’ll definitely be looking into one of the tools to “fix” (or break, depending on how you look at it) Stacks.
  (tags: Apple Leopard hacks)
• The verdict: Leopard spanks Vista, continues OS X’s reign of excellence
  On objective (?) comparison of Leopard and Vista. On Computerworld.com. Are there any GOOD Vista reviews?
  (tags: Leopard Apple Vista Windows review)

Do you really need it?

I installed Leopard on my aging but otherwise faithful 12″ PowerBook G4 yesterday. I hadn’t planned on updating it because I didn’t think it had enough processing power to handle the new OS. But it met Mac OS X 10.5 requirements, so I figured, what the heck? I could always bring it back down to Tiger if I needed to.

The problem with older Macs running new software — including operating system software — is that they often don’t perform as well as a newer Mac will. You’ll notice this when attempting to complete processor-intensive tasks, such as opening large documents, applying filters in Photoshop, and — dare I say it? — searching for items on your hard disk.

Sidebar Searches

And that brings us to Leopard’s built-in Sidebar searches.

A Leopard installation reconfigures the Mac OS X Sidebar to make it better organized and a bit more usable. But what it also does is set up a Searches section that is preconfigured with six searches: three time-related searches and three file type related searches. Clicking a search in the Sidebar performs that search.

I want to point out here that the Smart Folders feature, which is used to create these Sidebar search items, was available in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, too. It just wasn’t an in-your-face feature set up in the Sidebar by Apple. As discussed on pages 98 through 99 in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger: Visual QuickStart Guide, Tiger made it possible to save a search as a smart folder, which could be added to the Sidebar by clicking a check box in the Save As dialog. Leopard works the same way (see pages 93 through 94 in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide, but Apple evidently wanted to prove how useful this feature was by putting a few examples in the Sidebar for all to see and use.

But just how useful are these examples? I’m not sure they’re useful at all. While you might find it helpful to click a Sidebar item and quickly find all files that have changed today, that list contains all files — not just documents. As I type this, the Today search brings up 108 items on my little PowerBook, most of which are RTF files that may have been installed with the update I did twenty minutes ago. How useful is that? And I’ve only been using the computer for an hour so far today.

What Do You Think?

Give those preconfigured searches a quick try and see for yourself what the results are. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

Back? Okay. Now tell me: are they useful? Did you get the results you expected? Where they results you could use?

And did you try the All Documents search? That’s the one on the bottom of the list.

I tried it this morning on this PowerBook, which has a 867MHz G4 processor (the minimum for Leopard), and started the computer on a mission it took quite a while to complete. Why? Because it came up with several hundred search results, most of which were configuration files buried within the depths of Mac OS’s file hierarchy. And this is on a computer that, so far, contains only a clean installation of Leopard (without all the extra fonts and printer drivers the installer offers to add), ecto (which I’m using to compose this blog entry), and Firefox. That’s it. I don’t even have my own documents installed yet!

Because the Leopard installation was new and the hard disk had not yet been indexed, the computer had to churn through all the files to find them. That slowed down the entire system, making me regret that I had installed Leopard at all. But now that the hard disk has been indexed, clicking that search displays results more quickly.

The question remains: how useful is the All Documents search?

Out with the Old, In with the New

What you might not realize is that the Sidebar is configurable. That means you can add or remove things from it.

As I explain in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide (on page 158, in case you’re wondering), you can remove an item from the sidebar by simply dragging it off. Try it for yourself right now. Get rid of the preconfigured searches you don’t think you’ll use.

That’ll not only clean up your Sidebar, but it’ll prevent your computer from having to churn through files in the event that you accidently click one of the searches.

With the searches you don’t need out of the way, you can feel good about adding the searches you do need. Use the Spotlight menu or search box or the Find command to creating a meaningful search that you think you’ll use again and again. Then save it as a Smart Folder and use the check box in the Save As dialog to add the search to the Sidebar. (Remember, you can always remove it.)

Curious about how this feature works? It’s simple. A smart folder is a saved search query file that, when clicked, performs the search. The default location for a smart folder is the Saved Searches folder inside the Library folder in your Home folder. (So this means you can have different saved searches than another user on your computer.) When you add a smart folder to the Sidebar, it’s the same as adding any other file to the sidebar — your Mac creates an alias of it. When you remove it from the Sidebar, the original item you created remains in the Saved Searches folder, so you can add it back. (This is not true with the predefined searches, which are saved elsewhere and cannot be easily added back when you remove them.)

Want to learn more about searching in Leopard? Check out my Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide. You can find it in Apple stores and on Amazon.com.

Want to get tips like this delivered to your mailbox as they are released? Subscribe to the e-mail version of this feed. (Don’t worry, we don’t use or sell your e-mail address for anything other than content from this feed and you can unsubscribe easily at any time.) Or subscribe to this feed using your favorite RSS reader.