Fixing Spotlight's abuse of external drives with Optin Indexing
I have a modest proposal for correcting Spotlight's (ab)use of external drives: Opt-in Indexing - only index the following locations...
Spotlight currently implements Privacy by allowing you to specify existing locations you do not want indexed (you cannot provide patterns and cannot prevent indexing of external drives before connecting them). Connect a friend's external drive, or better yet, a broken iPod to see how this can be a problem (my broken iPod brought my PowerBook to a thrashing halt thanks to Spotlight). It is impossible - as of the Leopard Preview from WWDC 2006 - to have Spotlight only index specific locations you want indexed.
Hi Ed, Your analysis is questionable at best. A lot of stocks have lost value since last May. If you had selected...
I would like your help in informing Apple that Opt-in Indexing would make Spotlight substantially better.
I have filed the following as Apple RadarWeb Bug ID# 468 plus 10437: ******************************************************************************** Spotlight's current blacklist approach to scoping indexing is inconvenient when used with external drives. Spotlight indexes all new drives automatically and provides no means to predefine blacklisted drives since the blacklist interface only works to list existing file hierarchies. This is an irritation for any drive, but is extremely bad with damaged drives. My iPod's hard drive failed a while back (I didn't know this) and when I connected it Spotlight brought my PowerBook to its knees trying to traverse the corrupted drive. Spotlight's blacklist approach makes it a nightmare for administrators who are sometimes tasked with debugging hardware failures in drives.
Well, in college I was raised on NextStep. So naturally I adapt to the OS X way of doing things. And it'd be natural that I'd say nice things about OS X and recommend it...
As a User Experience Analyst I find that showing what is not going to be indexed is much less intuitive than showing what is. Even from a usability perspective this Spotlight Privacy feature is flawed and should be redesigned.
Please support an Opt-in or Whitelist approach to Spotlight indexing. ********************************************************************************
You can help by filing unique (copies of mine will be too easy to filter) bugs and providing feedback to Apple on this explaining why Opt-in Indexing would be good for you and why the current "Privacy" feature of Spotlight is unacceptable: https:--bugreport.apple.com
Regards, Alain O'Dea User Experience Analyst