love love love love love!

The Finder is so much better (I skipped 10.3)

Most everything runs faster now on my old 733 G4

Dashboard calculator: Now I don't have to write down or remember the numbers I'm working with because I can see the Transform window & the Calculator AT THE SAME TIME.

-

I would love to be able to run the OS off the DVD like you could with pre-X versions. That ability made my life much easier over the weekend when my main hard drive died.

I bought my first mac (Powerbook 15" 1.6 Ghz, 1Gb Ram) when Tiger came out. (In fact, I waited to order until it was available.) I've been using Linux almost exclusively since a couple of years, only using Windows for design work (Indesign & Photoshop).

In general I love the platform and the OS. Some things about my Powerbook and Tiger I like (+) and don't like (-):

+ Spotlight: I transferred a bunch of unsorted data to my new Powerbook, meaning to sort it neatly into folders. Haven't gotten around to doing this, mainly because I can find almost anything in seconds using Spotlight.

+ iTunes: for obvious reasons (although native Ogg Vorbis support would be nice)

- Quicktime: I don't really dislike the player, but I find it ridiculous having to upgrade to Pro just to be able to view full-screen video. I mean, come on?

+- Dashboard: Sure, it provides some nice eye-candy, and it's fun to 'wow' my Windows-using friends with it, but most of the time it's just eating up (lots of) memory. I am under the impression (although I could be wrong) that my laptop runs *much* warmer when Dashboard is on.

+- Hardware: Of course the design is second to none, but is it really necessary for the laptop to run that hot??? I do love the attention given to detail, both in design and functions (automatically backlit keyboard, pulsating snooze led, led in ac plug, firewire target mode, ...)

- Keyboard: If I had known that a Belgian (Azerty) keyboard didn't have keys for square brackets [] and accolades {} I would have ordered a qwerty keyboard in a second. To me this is the biggest disappointment in buying my PB. If anyone knows a cheap way to order and replace a qwerty keyboard, be sure to let me know! It's terrible when coding CSS or PHP. Coming from a full-size Thinkpad keyboard (which takes the same amount of space) this is really hard getting used to.

- Window buttons: The '+' button is *so* unintuitive. I've always learned that + means *larger*, yet when I want to use my full screen when browsing trough my iTunes library, I have to drag the window, because when I click the 'maximise' button, I get a tiny, unusable player window. Same happens in Safari. Luckily Firefox doesn't follow the Os X standard and gives me a real maximise.

- Theming: Some applications (iTunes comes to mind) have got the ugly brushed metal look, while others (Finder) don't. There's no easy way that I know of to turn this theming off and get a consistent look across all of my applications.

+ Battery life: better than every other laptop I've owned to date

+ Airport: the signal reception is a little bit below that of my Centrino laptop, but it's almost twice as good as most PCMCIA cards I've tried.

That's about it. I realise this is more about the Powerbook in general than about Tiger, but to me it's part of the experience as a mac switcher.

-L.

Smart folders rock my block! I use labels to code active/inactive jobs and now can have one folder for each and never have to worry about dragging files.

Dashboard is a memory hog. It is great to have the calculator and dictionary that handy, though.

Mail is smarter.

Spotlight seems pretty useless. It doesn't work as a launcher as they somewhat touted. QuickSilver has it beat by leaps and bounds.

New Developer tools are quite lovely, as is the 3D graphing application.

love it.

dashboard is a nice promise waiting for some useful widgets. i've yet to find one that's really all that.

tools for writers sometimes get overlooked amid the visual hoopla, but tiger's got some good ones. dictionary/thesaurus app is good looking and fast, and this is just smart, geeky fun.

spotlight needs to wait til i'm done typing before it starts searching, tho.

I don't really dislike the player, but I find it ridiculous having to upgrade to Pro just to be able to view full-screen video. I mean, come on?

That's what VLC was invented for. Regardless of your platform, this is really the video player software to have installed on your machine:

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

If I had known that a Belgian (Azerty) keyboard didn't have keys for square brackets [] and accolades {}

Whoa. That's weird. And somewhat ridiculous. Does Apple assume Belgians don't code?

+ Battery life: better than every other laptop I've owned to date

I'm still amazed that my 3-year old powerbook still can retain a nearly full charge. My wife's Sony Vaio has gone through 2 batteries in less that time (and even when fully charged, only gets half the time as the PB).

I love the integrated dictionary. For me it's completely worth the upgrade.

CNTRL+APPLE+D is my new favorite shortcut. I can finally understand all the big words used on this website.

I haven't moved to Tiger yet. I use Konfabulator (now free from Yahoo) and really like having these widgets Weather, Calendar, and iTunes Bar on my desktop all the time. Anyhow, here is a work around to turn off Dashboard:

Controlling the dashboard.

Sometimes you just don’t want it around. Note: This is a per user setting. I do not know how to disable it by default for every user. Possibly if you make this change to /Library/Preferences/com.apple.dashboard

Make Dashboard go away

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES

Make Dashboard come back

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO

You have to restart the Dock to have this take effect

killall Dock

The terminal is your friend.

[Check the link in my sig for more info.]

There's no easy way that I know of to turn this theming off and get a consistent look across all of my applications.

There are several applications available and hundreds of themes to change parts or all of your mac's look. Only a couple unify the look: one is called Iridium (all apps and the finder have the "Unified Toolbar look as seen in Spotlight or Apple Mail) and another called Gershix (an OS 9 remake). Many themes are very attractive but most if not all will make one or more apps look odd (i.e. the buttons for macromedia's toolbar) as the theme makers test themes based on their computers and what they have installed. Interestingly enough some aspect of the changes in look and feel of Tiger has come from themes developed 2 or 3 years ago.

Apple's logic about why different applications have a different surface texture is in relation to their HCI (human computer interaction) implementation: i.e. brushed metal apps can be dragged or moveed from any part of the app. Unified toolbar apps (spotlight, mail) have Spotlight capabilities, ect. The look is a visual clues about how the app functions in the environment of the OS.

Personally in Tiger, Spotlight has made the upgrade worth while. Searching a couple hundred gigs in a few seconds is fabulous. Dashboard is cute for now, but shows the road forward for integrated and interactive application deployment, as Vista will also have an API for that. But Dashboard is still a pretty direct rip off of Konfabulator which Yahoo just purchased - which has been available for 2 + years. The main difference btwn Dashboard and Konfabulator is Dashboard sits at a different visual layer of the OS. Kongabulator sits at the desktop level or above (configurable by widget).

Expose works swell and serves it's purpose when using one monitor only.

All in all I love the functionality, but the eye candy bugs me (I want the computer to be a tool to do my work, not an environment to live/work in) as does the increasing power the computer needs to run not only the OS itself but also applications, forcing upgrades almost annually - many days I find myself missing the simplicity of OS 9, Photoshop 7, Illustrator 10 and Quark 5. Those were the days when 512 Mb of ram screamed!

Gregor: thanks for the pointers to the theming stuff, didn't know that.

I can't seem to make this contexutal dictionary work. (A) Does it work in any program? (B) You say capital 'D', so must the caps lock be on?

And for those looking to conserve memory, you don't need to get into the shell or command line and turn off Dashboard. Just close (click 'X' on the Dashboard app) all the widgets out, and you'll be okay. You can even open the Activity Monitor to see that nothing is running. And, really, what's 10-20mb these days? It's not like we're running a 100mhz processor anymore.

Let's talk on-screen typography, more specifically, glyph rendering.

When is Apple going to step up and stop 'the fuzz'? For a brand that positions itself as 'the designers friend', its lack of progress in on-screen typography is ludicrous.

I know everyone loves to hate Microsoft, but you have to give them credit for thier advances in this area. ClearType is worlds beyond anything Apple has to offer. OpenType is, well, if you are involved in any type of typography, a great advancement. Then there is the new set of fonts to be released with the next MS OS.

(please don't let me take this to a mac vs. pc debtate)

I practically fell out of my chair when I upgraded from Jaguar (10.2) to Panther (10.3) because Panther is amazing. When I upgraded from Panther to Tiger, I was entertained then mildly annoyed. Ultimately I like Tiger, but having 512 MB of RAM is just not enough to get it to play nice. 1 GB at least to keep it running smoothly. It seems bizarre to me that a .x update would be such a leap in resource demands. Well, Apple's in the business to move hardware.

I like dashboard and spotlight, but there are a lot of aspects of the OS that feel more like feature bloat than improvements. The fields in the windows of the Finder used to give me quick results, now they try to act like a mini-spotlight and it drives me nuts. If I wanted spotlight, I'd use it, thanks.

I think I'm more annoyed at Apple's overly optimistic hardware 'requirements' that do not produce the results as advertised. But I still prefer Mac OS, so that's saying something.

I can't seem to make this contexutal dictionary work. (A) Does it work in any program? (B) You say capital 'D', so must the caps lock be on?

Shift or Cap Locks won't do it - nothing seems to control the case.

Otherwise it works in safari, Pages, Preview (as long as fonts were not converted to outlines) and mail that I know of.

Only apps that integrated with the apple core services call up that menu -- since most have their own unique conxteual menus that's mainly apple apps and perhaps those that use web core or some other Apple code as thier main compiling code -- Cocoa only? Not sure as Camino does not but that's th GUI onlu for Cocoa. Omniweb does I believe and the other Omni apps likely do as well.

About widgets and memory. It was an issue - almost like a memory leak/sieve and apple was supposed to have resolved that in 10.4.1: widgets would only use CPU if brought to the front and go dormant when in the background. Anyone notice if that was fixed?

1 GB at least to keep it running smoothly.

Depends on what you're doing. I have an 800 MHz tibook with 768 Mb of ram that works just swell with Adobe CS apps, but some CS2 apps run like dogs -- maybe it's opera in the background as the shell for bridge and Adobe Stock Photos sucking down CPU. Dunno on that though. Quark 6.5 is famously slow to open on OS X and I've run it on aluminum PBs, tibooks and G5s with 768 to 1.25 Gb of memory and they are all about the same, It's snappy after 1st launch though.

Amapi and Hexagon 3d modelers run fine as well on 768 Mb on the tibook.

For you interactive gurus. how's flash run on complex files?

The fields in the windows of the Finder used to give me quick results, now they try to act like a mini-spotlight and it drives me nuts.

That's one of the things I love about the new search. I use it way more than I use spotlight.

-

I bet Bryony never has to use search or spotlight

I find it very safe to say that Tiger was built for the dual processing line of Power PC's as it runs like a gazelle on my Dual 2.7ghz machine.

Recently I've been enjoying the "mighty mouse" as Apple chooses to coin it. Finally being given the privilege to right click... who would have thought such wonderousness could exist!? The analog scroll ball makes for a very fun and efficient way to navigate through various applications and web content, definitely a time saving device, perhaps the "spotlight of mice" even. I have the scroll ball set to expose all windows when clicked on, and the two buttons on the side when "pressed" brings up dashboard. I do however with the side buttons were programmable for seperate functions, but thats just pedantic.

One little snippet that hasnt been mentioned here is when viewing webpages in safari and you wish to send a page to family or coworkers, hit apple + I and it copies everything from that page to send in email form. (or just click on File--Mail Contents of This Page) Convenience!

This may predate Tiger (I'm not sure), but Apple has so many useful, but hidden, keyboard commands. Try this (and it's pretty handing to flipping color palettes in reverse or negative):

press down all a once: control + option + command (apple) and while holding the down press 8

If it does predate Tiger, it took an "accident" on my end to discover it.

wow!

Gregor, that little trick works on my Pantherized iMac. Very weird! Who'd want to use such a thing?

Jason: On occassion I've wanted to see the negative of a mood board I'm working on. In a couple cases it lead to reworking a palette. Otherwise it's pretty useless.

>Who'd want to use such a thing?

It's meant as an accessibility thing for those with vision impairment.

Go to your system preferences and click on Universal Access.

it's meant as an accessibility thing for those with vision impairment.

I can see that being quite useful in that case. interestingly no screen capture utility or command + shift + 3 captures the negative.

Back to work now....

HHHmmm. Maybe we need a Widget for that.

Seriously if you are just now getting Tiger you are so far behind.

Far behind? How so? Waiting until the OS has been tested on others' computers makes more sense than leaping right in and dealing with the first batch of problems. Sheesh. I'll bet you run out and buy the latest and greatest of anything, as soon as it hits the shelves (or sooner)!

Seriously if you are just now getting Tiger you are so far behind.

cool. it's a contest.

"Seriously if you are just now getting Tiger you are so far behind."

::snicker::

Yeah, can't you see all of us out on the horizon, enjoying the future. It's so bright and shiny here. Unless you really need/want something specific, stick with Panther. Seriously. Wait for Lion or Liger or Lion-o.

I liked the idea of some of the stuff in Tiger, but ultimately I ended up putting Panther back on. The apps running in the background were too much of a memory hog on my modest system (an old G4 with 1GB of RAM). I never used Spotlight and Dashboard looked neat, but it just sucked up way too much memory. Also the FontBook SERIOUSLY gave me some font issues when I tried to use it. Anyone else experience that?

Mail was a lot smarter though. When I upgrade my machine, I will probably justify putting Tiger back on, but until then, nah.

"...interestingly no screen capture utility or command + shift + 3 captures the negative."

That's probably because the change is happening at the hardware level, not the software level. You want the negative, simply open the screen capture in Photoshop and command-i to invert the colour table.

You guys have me starting to think that actually I don't like Tiger at all, that my 733mhz processor can's handle it, that the 5 widgets that I have running are actually dragging my machine down to a crawl, that my apps run slower, and that the computing joy I have been experiencing the last few months is all an illusion...

No, I'm standing firm. I love it.

-

Amber, run to Insider Software & purchase FontAgent! The only thing FontBook is good for is gathering digital dust.

I shied away from FontBook in Panther, but it's like a whole new program in Tiger. I just got a PB and after reading a little about FontBook's improvements, I decided to give it a shot before installing suitcase.

I followed this tutorial and I've been a happy FontBook user ever since.

There's both a reason and a name for the reversed, white-on-black screen. It's called "troglodyte mode" and it's for late-night programming, when you've been staring at the screen for hours and just can't see the code anymore. You reverse the screen and it buys you a little more time before your eyeballs fall out...

- Keyboard: If I had known that a Belgian (Azerty) keyboard didn't have keys for square brackets [] and accolades {} I would have ordered a qwerty keyboard in a second.

Lode, square brackets and accolades are accessable on a belgian azerty keyboard on a mac. I also have an azerty keyboard and I just checked it. Brackets you can get by typing alt+shift+) , accolades you get when typing alt+)

I wanted to like Tiger so badly, but all it did was make my 12 inch PowerBook spit hot fire and run real slow. Yeah, widgets are cool; but all I'd really like is for my CS apps to behave.

Sorry Steve, this one didn't rock my world.

I agree with Kyle, using the Blurbomat tutorial has brought me much Font Book bliss.

I'm running a sawtooth G4 with a dual 500 and over a gig of RAM. I've upgraded my graphics card (with panther, so I could get that cool spinning user switching thing...)

Besides some problems importing into Mail 2.0 (which I eventually fixed), I've been running Tiger and having almost ZERO problems.

It boots faster. It NEVER crashes. I don't have the problem with disk mounting that has plagued my machine since I got it in 2001.

All in all. I pretty damn impressed. And yeah, I like dashboard for putting a whole bunch of apps a finger stroke away. Like conversions and translating and my clock. (I've always hated it in the menu bar.)

And even spotlight works okay. It's taken some getting used to and adjusting of the standard settings. (I don't need it to search through some of the stuff. Like my email. I know what's in there.)

And the dictionary rocks. Now if they would just add some other languages or translation to it.

I read the Blurbomat tutorial a few weeks ago and figured the FontBook features were worth the upgrade. Plus I really loved Mail's new interface and the ability to print my calendars from iCal. I'm not that impressed with Spotlight, and Dashboard is a good distraction (although the Gas wigdet is my new best friend: find the cheapest gas station nearest you).

I have used FontAgent Pro in Panther and while it was slow, it did okay. But I really wanted Font Book since it is so tightly integrated with the rest of the system.

(I'm also using FontCard from Unsanity. It's a great little haxie: it displays your fonts in their respective libraries/groups and labels them appropiately such as PS or TT, etc. just like ATM used to do in OS 9)

At first Font Book seemed pretty cool. You can now build new libraries without having them copied into your System folder (they stay in the original location - way cool). You can have them all turned off until you need them, plus it can even do some auto-activation.

But then I began having some issues. Amber, tell me if this is what you were experiencing: gradual slow-downs in Illustrator and Photoshop prompted me to check in on Font Book. Lo and behold, whole libraries had magically activated themselves. Well, that was no good since I have somewhere around a thousand or so fonts... I can't have them activating randomly.

So it's back to FontAgent Pro. Granted it's not as slow as it used to be (you need the Tiger-combatable version) but it still seemed to have *some* drag to it. Unfortunately it's real picky about what fonts it lets you use. I had a font set from a client (they use Suitcase) that they use flawlessly. In FA Pro the screen and printer fonts *have* to match, or some-such other, or you can't use them. FA Pro wouldn't let me use the italic or bold or condensed modern, but I could use the rest of the fonts just fine. but that still didn't do me any good.

I can put that same font in Font Book and it works just fine. It's more forgiving I guess. So while I keep FA Pro around to manage the numerous fonts I have, I'll use Font Book as a backup to FA Pro's finickiness.

Most of my fonts work fine. Sometimes even though they are activated, Illustrator or Photoshop won't let me select them. So I have to do the application-restart thing, or sometimes even the system-restart thing. I won't go to Suitcase because the horror stories are worse than my actual experience with FA Pro and Font Book.

Jeff, have you had any funny experiences with FA Pro similar to mine?

Does anyone else have any issues/praises/advice for font usage in Tiger?

Jeff, have you had any funny experiences with FA Pro similar to mine?

Michael, I did have a couple type families that I had to delete, then re-import to get them to work right. No idea why. The only other odd thing is that one type family (from Storm, but not the other two) shows up way down at the bottom of the font menu with the non-western fonts in InDesign. Also, I wish that when I closed the window it didn't close the program. Other than that it works perfectly. Of course my definition of perfect might be a lesser one than yours--I came from Suitcase & the horror stories are true.

I tried FontBook when I got Tiger and experienced the same weirdness that you did.

the current version of font agent pro has brought my start-up time to a crawl -- I reverted back to 3.0.

Anyone else experience this massive slow down of boot time (which is way slower than 10.3.6 with large amounts of fonts installed) - roughly 5 minutes to start up and load the desktop and HD?

I did after the first install. And as for fonts, I do not use any of those crummy management programs. I just drag what I need into my LIbrary and then remove it when finished. BUT, I will look into this FontBook improvement. Hopefully it uses less RAM than Suitcase---what a hog!

The only other odd thing is that one type family (from Storm, but not the other two) shows up way down at the bottom of the font menu with the non-western fonts in InDesign.

Is it Lido? I have the same issue. No idea why either.

Gregor, I have no idea what's causing your startup to slow down. I don't have that issue (Tiger starts up kinda fast actually). FA Pro 3.0.2 is the latest version, I'd recommend trying that one (if 3.0 is what you tried before). Do you have a lot of fonts activated at startup?

Jason, thanks for posting this topic. I've been really curious what other designers do to manage their fonts. Be sure to read the Blurbomat tutorial to get a good overview of Font Books' new features before you start messing around with it.

;-)

Michael, you're very welcome, but the real thanks goes to your peers above, who shared their opinions. In truth, designers give so much attention and consideration to hard ware and soft ware. It's an interesting study in tribal behavior. I often wonder if Saul, Paul, Josef, Renee, or Seymor gave this much attention to their razors, rulers, and drafting tables. Something tells me they did. Designers are tool people that have adapted to technology's evolution, becoming techno people---Panther, Tiger, XP, or Red Hat.

reverted back to 3.0. FAP 3.0.2 is what's slowing it down.

it's probably indexing lot's of fonts at start-up?

Gregor, that slow start-up thing has never happened to me. (But I've only got a measly 1023 fonts in FAP and only 1 small start up set)

Michael, it's Sebastian, not Lido.The only thing I can think of (and it's pretty poor explanation) is that Sebastian is an OTF and my other Storm fonts are PS.

I just read the Blurbomatic tutorial. Nothig in there made me want to look at FontBook again.

It's great to talk Tiger with you all. I work at home & my wife's interest only goes so far

Gregor, how many fonts do you have set to be activated at startup? Unlike Jeff, even after my first restart I didn't have a slow startup.

Jason, you're right my peers are to be thanked as well. I was just acknowledging the fact that you recognize that our tools warrant topics of their own from time to time here on Speak Up. I bet that the "Old Masters" (of graphic design, as I like to call them) had wonderful geeky conversations about their pens and pencils and grease markers and such.

Jeff, the feeling is mutual as I'm in the same boat.

MIchael:

I have roughly 900 fonts installed on a healthy and very well maintained mac. Using FAP 3.0 Tiger boots in 30 seconds, whith FAP 3.0.2 installed this takes up to 5 minutes. Each are configured exactly the same in their preferences. Insidersoftware tech support has no answers for this so I just keep using 3.0 as it does what I need.

BTW Jason, the slow down after first installing tiger is standard as spotlight is indexing. OS point upgrades will have the same, but a bit faster, strt-up time.

If it weren't for the hassle and Spotlight I'd go back to Panther as Tiger has also dramatically affected my wireless connectivity - it's bee 1/3 slower since installing Tiger and drops the connection frequently.

Ugh, sorry to hear about that Gregor. Insider doean't really have a good support area on thier website, just an FAQ section.

MIchael:

I actually called Insider and they couldn't help me. I have a feeling FAP 3.0.2 was autoactivating .dfonts on start up.

But that's the least of my worries - let's move on to iview media pro... Anyone figure out a way to get it to read .nef files in Tiger. From what I can see, since iview uses quicktime to view camera raw files, QT doesn't support .nef.

Clunky old Portfolio reads them....

Anyone with any ideas?

Ine: thanks, I knew there were shortcuts, but would it kill them to put the symbols on the keys?

Also, I think three fingers should only be needed for ctrl-alt-del.. Often-used symbols like square brackets that require me to push three keys are a bit rudiculous.

Anyone knows of a good utility to remap certain keys?

Another question: anyone knows what the symbol on the '6'-key (a crossed-trough box) is for?

Another question: anyone knows what the symbol on the '6'-key (a crossed-trough box) is for?

It's the equivalent of the 'C' key on a calculator. It clears a calculation when using the Calculator program, or other data-handling programs. When you have 'num lock' pressed, the keys 6,7,8,9,0,u,i,o,p,j,k,l,;,m,. and / operate like the calculator keys on an extended keyboard.

I can't seem to make this contexutal dictionary work.

Make sure your mouse pointer is pointing to the word when you press ctrl-apple-D. It doesn't work by highlighting the word first.

Anyone figure out a way to get it to read .nef files in Tiger?

I should say quick time 7 doesn't support .nef files. Iview Media Pro worked great on panther and quick time 6.

Everything is great for me on my g4 laptop except spotlight. It needs to wait till i'm done typing (this is a real problem on very large hard drives and firewire drives) and it needs to be faster and it needs all the advanced search functions in one window, and OS with three slightly different search views is highly annoying.

Do you remember when you just pressed Apple F and a search box popped up, you pressed return then it went away and opened a window with what you wanted. That was nice I wish Apple and Macromedia would get back on that one.

Spotlight is a drag---literally. I had a similar problem with an external drive I use, when Spotlight wanted to index it. This took 1.4 hours for a 120gb drive.

Tiger runs fine on my 1.5ghz machine, but I would not install it on anything less than that. Especially if you have low RAM---less than 768mb. Even at the Mac store, one of the G5 towers only had 768mb of RAM and it was running at a crawl: the store rep blamed it on iTune's extra large music library, that played to entertain customers.

Hmmm... has any Font Book users tried this little application: Veenix?

It looks promising, but after spending a week testing Font Book and FontAgent Pro between Panther and Tiger (several installs and reinstalls), I just can't really test anymore font management applications for a while.

Regarding Spotlight, I can't figure out how to get the listed directory (at the bottom of the window) for the selected "found" item to drill down—like it did in Panther—instead of listing the directory horizontally.

Gregor:

iView can read .nef files in Tiger (D1x). Ran into this when I installed the other night. Solution was somewhere amidst:

• toss iView prefs
• delete all Nikon stuff
• reinstall Nikon View/Capture

Tiger so far so good on 1gHz (originally 350mHz) G4. 1.5gb RAM, maxed out. Not slower or faster than Panther. Not crazy about Spotlight getting in my way. Is it me?

In general I have like most of the new things about Tiger EXCEPT for Spotlight.

It either finds nothing or way too much. I depend on being able to search for files by name.

My solution was to install the very simple and small app Easyfind. It is just a bit slower than Sherlock was, but is much more effective for me than Spotlight. It can't search my emails, but that's what I use Eudora for.