Comment by amluto
6 months ago
> This year, App Intents gains support for visual intelligence. This enables apps to provide visual search results within the visual intelligence experience, allowing users to go directly into the app from those results.
How about starting with reliably, deterministically, and instantly (say <50ms) finding obvious things like installed apps when searching by a prefix of their name? As a second criterion, I would like to find files by substrings of their name.
Spotlight is unbelievably bad and has been unbelievably bad for quite a few years. It seems to return things slowly, in erratic order (the same search does not consistently give the same results) and unreliably (items that are definitely there regularly fail to appear in search results).
Fwiw, spotlight in MacOS seems to be getting a major revamp too (basing this on the WWDC livestream, but there seems to be a note about it on their blog[0] too), pushing it a bit more in the direction of tools like Alfred or Raycast, and allegedly also being faster (but that's marketing speak of course, so we'll see when Fall comes).
[0]: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/06/macos-tahoe-26-makes-...
I have no idea what happened to my Mac in the last month but for some reason, spotlight isn't able to search by name any app name anymore. Like if search for Safari, it will show me results for everything except the Safari app. Even tried searching for Safari.app and still no results. It can't find any apps.
“How about starting with reliably, deterministically, and instantly (say <50ms) finding obvious things like <…> searching by a prefix of their name? As a second criterion, I would like to find files by substrings of their name”
Even I can, and have, build search functionality like this. Deterministically. No LLMs or “AI” needed. In fact for satisfying the above criteria this kind of implementation is still far more reliable.
I've also written search code like this. It's trivial, at least at the scale of installed apps and such on a single computer.
AI makes it strictly worse. I do not want intelligence. I want to type, for example, "saf" and have Safari appear immediately, in the same place, every time, without popping into a different place as I'm trying to click it because a slower search process decided to displace the result. No "temperature", no randomness, no fancy crap.
Quicksilver worked great back in the day before Spotlight was ever even a thought.
User: yells Feedback into void.