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Spotless - Gain some control over Spotlight Pick of the Week
Spotless imageThe macosxhints Rating:
9 of 10
[Score: 9 out of 10]
Spotless is a simple little app that gives you a bit more control over OS X 10'4s Spotblight, er, Spotlight, feature. As you all probably know, Spotlight indexes your hard drives, theoretically making it easy to find everything on your machine. Personally, I don't use it much, as I find it's lack of easy-to-access boolean functions quite limiting. However, it has come in handy a couple of times when looking for a few obscure files on my machine, so I let it keep indexing my drives.

Despite my settings to the contrary in the Spotlight Privacy tab, however, Spotlight insists on re-indexing my two backup FireWire drives every time I reconnect them. This means that every search I run finds three (nearly identical) copies of every hit. Arghhh! This same glitch seemingly hit Dan Frakes, so he went solution hunting and found Spotless -- his full-blown writeup goes into great detail on the program and its features. Here's my exeuctive summary version:

Spotless will let you easily and permanently disable Spotlight indexing on any drive -- even if you move that drive to another machine after disabling indexing, Spotlight will still leave it alone. You can also turn off Spotlight completely, if you wish, and delete individual index files from each of your drives. I love it; I turned off my backup drives indexing, trashed their indexes, and then re-mounted them -- as promised, Spotlight is no longer indexing or searching those drives; hooray! This aggravation-saver is well worth $7.95, in my opinion (though I hope a future OS X update resolves the removable-drive issue, and gives us eaasier boolean searches!)

As an aside, I noted in last week's pick that I'm now working with the Mac Gems column at Macworld. Some picks, like Textpander last week, will be mine, and I'll do a longer writeup on Mac Gems. Others, like this one, will come from apps I've read about on Mac Gems. In both cases, I'll include a link to the longer Mac Gems article...
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  You rated: 1 / 5 (10 votes cast)
 
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Spotless - Gain some control over Spotlight
Authored by: wgscott on Oct 10, '05 07:37:46AM

mdutil is a command-line utility that permits the user to do many of these things as well, and comes with OS X.



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Spotless - Gain some control over Spotlight
Authored by: whoadoggy on Oct 10, '05 08:15:16AM

Just to pick a small nit, there are only 9 lights for a 10/10 POTW.



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Spotless - Gain some control over Spotlight
Authored by: wgscott on Oct 10, '05 10:48:01AM

8, if you start counting from 0

;)



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Spotless - Gain some control over Spotlight
Authored by: xSmurf on Oct 10, '05 11:02:08AM

And everyone knows any geek respectful of his title will!

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PM G4 DP 800 / 1.25gb / 120Gb+80Gb / CD/DVD±RW/RAM/DL
- The only APP Smurf



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Spotless - Gain some control over Spotlight
Authored by: robg on Oct 11, '05 06:32:21AM

Sorry, the textual score was wrong; I just fixed it...

-rob.



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Spotless - Gain some control over Spotlight
Authored by: ssuppe on Oct 10, '05 11:54:02PM

I have a 900Mhz G3 (Firewire) that Tiger had pretty much rendered unusable. I was just waiting for some time to put Panther back on. BUT this li'l utility made the whole thing even SNAPPIER. I recommend it for anyone who's got some hardware like mine!



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spotlight can do damage...
Authored by: prohtex on Oct 11, '05 03:10:09AM

in addition to making your computer unbearably slow at random and sometimes crucal times, spotlight will also start indexing a failing drive RIGHT after boot, possibly destroying data before you have a chance to run recovery utils. some say it won't index a failing drive but i learned this the hard way (it probably just uses the "S.M.A.R.T." check) for HD failure you should ALWAYS boot into single user mode off an external disk and modify your /etc/fstab so the disk doesn't mount and try to be read/written to.

however should you forget about this (it happens) and you boot a system with a rattling HD that you might want to recover data from, there is nothing worse than a background provess that starts rapidly reading and writing to the drive -- particularly if the process slows the system to a crawl.

should you choose to turn spotlight off to save your data and your sanity (another good time for spotlight to do its thing is when you are outputting 10gig client aftereffects comp late for deadline and OOPS "Spotlight" thinks your computer is idle) you are left with no fulltext search in mail, and no file search on your disk. that's a terrible mistake.

this, along with the crippling problems in automator (feels like an alpha - 30 secs to collapse a tab?) and the "handy" 10.4 warning dialogues that come up when renaming file extensions or downloading apps in safari (both of which CANNOT BE TURNED OFF) makes me feel like apple is not being attentive to their customers, the pro users and mac-heads who get others to adopt.

like windows, it now seems apple would rather force "features" on us rather than designing a new & elegant solution. for shame.



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spotlight can do damage...
Authored by: maddys_daddy on Oct 11, '05 11:25:05AM
10.4 warning dialogues that come up when ... downloading apps in safari (both of which CANNOT BE TURNED OFF)
Only a small item on your (legitimate) gripe list, but this particular one can be turned off by Saft. Well worth the small price.

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spotlight can do damage...
Authored by: raider on Oct 11, '05 11:47:45AM
I know this is going to sound petty, but here goes.

Apple (and other readers) might take your comments, suggestions, and complaints a bit more seriously if you would use better capitilization, punctuation, spelling and sentence structure.

Otherwise you just sound like a raving lunatic and people discount your comments without even trying to understand what they are saying.

Like people who have "save the environment" bumper stickers on a car that is spewing blue smoke and leaking fluids.

:)

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Hi, I need a little help here!!
Authored by: leeww on Oct 12, '05 02:38:25AM

Hi, I need a little help here!!

I too find that my machine starts indexing while I am trying to output After Effects files or render from Cinema 4D.

I have installed spotless, used the 'Volume Indexing Control' to switch off indexing on my main internal volume and my connected LaCie firewire drive.

I have also disabled indexing from the 'Master Indexing control.

I have then restarted.

But when I view spotless' main window, in the Master Indexing Staus' panel it says

"Spotlight indexing is Running'

[img]http://img374.imageshack.us/img374/4206/hhm3ja.jpg[/img]

What am I doing wrong ?

Any help much appreciated.


Lee




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Help!



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Hi, I need a little help here!!
Authored by: xxthcenturyboy on Oct 18, '05 07:02:26PM

http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/stopspotlightindex.html



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Hi, I need a little help here!!
Authored by: leeww on Oct 20, '05 07:28:45PM

Thanks, could not see any answer to my problem, but thanks anyhow! :)

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Help!



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