Thank you for your help. I hope that works.
But I also hope that you appreciate the irony that the list of instructions you just gave me looks no different from some of the arcane instructions that Windows experts sometimes give to people having trouble with their own computers.
All I was saying is that, to, to their credit, MS did an awesome thing and made their Start Menu indexed and responded intelligently to keypresses in a way that makes it easy to get what you want, whether you are a GUI person or a keyboard person.
I didn’t even have to know that there was some weird indexing scheme that needs to be managed. Apple seems a little complicated in that regard. Hell, almost Windows like :-)
In the larger picture, I don’t care if MS ripped it off of Apple. Apple ripped the mouse off of Xerox. I don’t care. MS ripped off the idea of IRQ driven mouse updates from Apple. I don’t care. All of the innovation is been good and amazing for all of us. What counts is the end product that these vendors are selling us, and how well they compete against each other.
What can I say. They are both computers. Not everything is simple. I wish Apple had a button in the Spotlight preferences that says "Re-Index" that you click and forget. My point was that the "awesome thing" had already been done by Apple (and patented by them) two years before Microsoft included it in Vista... and the Apple version was also accessible by either GUI people or keyboard people.
By the way, Xerox did not invent the Mouse. Douglas Engelbart of the Augmentation Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute invented the computer mouse in 1964. Engelbart received the patent on the mouse in 1970, the same year PARC was founded. Incidentally, Apple ripped off nothing from PARC. Apple paid Xerox about 3 million dollars in pre-IPO preferred stock for two eight-hour visits to PARC and for the use of what Jobs and three Apple engineers learned there.
All of the innovation is been good and amazing for all of us. What counts is the end product that these vendors are selling us, and how well they compete against each other.
There we agree.
On the other hand, over four years with Spotlight, and dozens of Macs, I have had to re-index a Mac only once.