MacWhines
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Mac Whine: Mail.app's wandering columns
As long as I can remember - at least since Mac OS X 10.4 and possibly even 10.3 - Mail.app hasn't been able to maintain column widths to save its life. It doesn't matter if I never touch the window width, or if I manually set each column exactly where I want it, or even if I ask nicely - Mail.app almost seems to enjoy playing an obnoxious game of 'what me worry?' with my column widths, tossing them to the digital wind at every opportunity. Run a search? Hello suddenly-double-sized-Attachment-column. Put on a pot of coffee in between TUAW posts? Better make extra room for the Date Received column, cuz there's no telling how much space it's going to gobble up behind my back.Ok fine, for the record: I don't actually believe Mail.app can tell when I'm making coffee. Still, the point stands: Mail.app needs to brush up on the 'How to be a Good Lil App' rules and learn how to keep everything in its place.
Mac Whine: Spotlight's disconnected image results
It's no secret that Spotlight needs a bit of work catch up to 2007. Users far and wide complain that it can grind to a halt all too quickly after firing up a fresh install of Mac OS X, and even though Apple has some good tips for Spotlight power users, it still just isn't quite *there* yet. So, to hop on the 'Mac Whine' train that Leo and his merry band of TWiTs have begun on MacBreak Weekly, I figured the rest of the Mac web could start chiming in with the occasional annoying quirks and problems with Apple's oh-so-shiny products.My first contribution is Spotlight's handling of image search. I've been trying to refresh myself lately on Spotlight and what it's capable of (such as finding text in a Photoshop layer), and I've also been playing around with Aperture as an alternative to iPhoto. One particularly annoying thing is the way Spotlight handles image search results, which you can see in the screenshot. I searched for "quick," and Spotlight found quite a few images that had that word somewhere in their filename or metadata - but it doesn't show me where or what that data is (i.e. - why this photo was relevant to my search). Spotlight *must* have found some metadata relevant to my search since it returned this image (in this case I suspect it was the name I assigned to the image in iPhoto), which Spotlight clearly must have seen - so why didn't it share what that data is? The default result UI doesn't even tell me where those images are or what app they're tied to; I have to click on the (i) to reveal things like whether this pic was in my iPhoto library or simply laying around somewhere else. Add this minor gripe to the (large) pile of things that could use a coat or two of polish from Apple's Spotlight ninjas.
