A case for spotlight
Back in the summer of 2009 Apple introduced spotlight search in iOS 3.0. This was a feature that many people were very excited about, it allowed the user to search for apps, email messages, calendar events, items in the devices iPod library, contacts, and notes. In iOS 4.0 Apple added the ability to search SMS messages, the web (using your default search engine), and Wikipedia right from your home screen. As useful as spotlight seemed I never really used it in fact I turned it off to improve performance. The in application search (i.e. Mail, messages, and iPod) always seemed more useful to me plus the system side spotlight search always seemed slow.
If all the above is true then why am I making a case for spotlight?
Two weeks ago I had some wifi issues on my iPhone. For some reason it refused to connect to a known working network. I tried renewing the DHCP lease, forgetting the network, and several reboots but nothing worked. My next go to solution was to reset the network settings on the entire device and start over. I accidentally tapped to reset the home screen layout and inadvertently un organized all the applications on my phone. Because I was in the middle of a work day and didn’t have the hours I needed to rearrange all my apps into their required location I turned to spotlight to find and launch apps. I still am launching apps that way today.I really have grown to love using spotlight on my ios devices as an app launcher in the same manner I use launchbar on my Mac.
Most people’s complaints about spotlight echo mine from the first paragraph, either it was too slow or just didn’t seem useful. From my experience it gets faster the more you use it. It seems that the initial search for something may take a few seconds but after it has been made subsequent searches for that same item seem to be almost instant.
Overall I recommend you give spotlight a second try. Be sure to dig into the settings for spotlight and turn off things you don’t need searched. For example, I have no need to search SMS messages or calendar events so I have those turned off. Additionally I also recommend reordering the way the items appear in the search results. I prefer to have applications first then contacts and email respectively after that.
