Pet peeve rant here. Nothing to see. Move along, move along

Look, I think there’s a spectrum of interest to do with Apple and things like the company’s WWDC. Most people are in the ‘never heard of it’ category, a great proportion are in the ‘and don’t care anyway’ set. If it does affect you or you are ever going to benefit from it or be even remotely interested, the smart money says you’ll look when you next buy a Mac or an iPhone. Or maybe you’ll just get these new features when they’re here and you’ll decide then if you’re interested.

That’s not only sensible, it is intelligent and only the teeniest bit dull.

Way over here in the not sensible, not necessarily all that intelligent but definitely bright and shiny category, you join me in watching the WWDC announcements and enjoy it.

But there is another set.

It’s the set of people who are quite interested. I have no criticism of this set. I have every criticism of the kind of technology journalism that tries to snare them. It’s the same kind of technology journalism that tries to snare us shiny interested people too. And it got me.

I read a headline today that ran: “Here’s one major new Yosemite and iOS 8 feature that got overlooked”. I am not even going to apologise for how that got me and I read it while waiting for the kettle to boil.

What I am going to do is boil in harmony because this major overlooked feature was Spotlight. This is broadly a search thing that Macs have had for ages and it is very good, it finds stuff including some answers to questions: I used it two minutes ago to add up some figures. Usually it’s how I find anything on my Mac. That script I wrote somewhere between 2005 and 2008, the one with a musical number in it, I wrote it in Final Draft, I think I emailed it to Bert that time, with just that kind of head-scratching detail, Spotlight will find the script pretty much instantly. Spotlight is Good.

And Spotlight is improved in the new OS X Yosemite. But the WWDC announcement included it. It fair belaboured it. First Apple told us what was new and showed some screenshots of it in action. Then it demonstrated these same features in action. (Just as an aside, the one thing I’d lose from an Apple announcement is the demo of what we’ve learnt about two seconds ago. Sometimes it’s good, I appreciate that it helps fix the details in one’s mind, but often enough I’m looking at my watch.)

We’re not done yet.

Having told us about it in detail and then demonstrated Spotlight in detail, Apple moved on to many, many other things – and kept using Spotlight throughout. They explicitly spoke of how it was built in to various other features.

There is only one way in which this can be regarded as Spotlight being ‘overlooked’ and that’s if the website running that stupid click-bait title was admitting that they forgot to cover it before.

You’ll notice there’s no link to the article. I’ve wasted enough of your time steaming away here, I’m not sending you their way.

My name is William, and I am a journalist. Hello, William.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Blue Captcha Image
Refresh

*