Of course I agree that's true, but come on. Apple made a mistake. They undeniably have the best application installation model. You drag a repository to your Application Folder. That's it. An application (and its constituent files) are one big .app file that contains all that is needed to run the app. No need for several dozen things that all need to be in the right place. And registry? Hell no.
They have the most brilliant application model and they screwed up by not letting the typie-thingie automatically know about YOUR APPS. Come on dude, that is foul.
It's almost like they are stuck in the days of their own failure. As if they don't expect people to have butt-loads of Mac apps.
Well that's not the case, at all.
Why do you keep insisting on something that simply is not true?
I repeat, krb: Dozens of Macs... all of them with Spotlight working as well as you claim Windows Vista's awesome Instant Search works. I add an application to any of those Macs, and Spotlight knows about it. I remove it, it's gone from Spotlight. It works on every Mac I have and every Mac my clients have.
It's almost like they are stuck in the days of their own failure. As if they don't expect people to have butt-loads of Mac apps.
I have a couple of hundred installed applications, Spotlight has every one of them indexed. I merely have to type enough of the apps name to make it unique in Spotlight and it is at the top of the list and will start merely by pressing ENTER or RETURN.
YOUR index was/is broken. It is obviously incomplete. It's possible that your computer was interrupted during the initial indexing process by a power failure or someone forcing the computer to quit. That was the cause of the one and only time I had to force a re-indexing... and I caused it. I accidentally turned off what I thought was a light switch which actually controlled the outlet that was used by both the light and the computer. The process of indexing the new Mac Pro, after I had migrated a client's files to it, was interrupted before completion. Several days later she called and said Spotlight could not find files she KNEW were on the computer. I checked and she was right. Re-indexing Spotlight solved the problem. That was three years ago; her Spotlight has been working flawlessly since.
That is not an error of system design by Apple. Where is the mistake other than your mistake assuming that your particular problem with your Mac is universal to all Macs and therefore a failing in the design of the OS?
Playing with spotlight here (having just found it—thanks for the morning’s entertainment—:).
Oddly, “CA” does not bring up Calculator, but “CAL” brings it up as the top hit.
Now I just changed the preferences to eliminate the categories I don’t want in the spotlight search, and calculator comes up using “CA” (due to the extra space available).
Can the algorithm is it using to allocate space for each category be tweaked?