Not happy with Leopard 10.5

Question

I finally gave in, bought the Leopard DVD, and upgraded from 10.3.9 to 10.5.2. Although mostly everything worked, I was VERY unhappy with some things ... so unhappy that I erased 10.5 and restored my 10.3 backup image over it. Here's what makes me unhappy:
1) Items in the Menu Bar: All the stuff I've added to the right side of the menu bar displays just as I want it in Panther ... but in Leopard, they're all scrambled and I have no way to control them. Further there is no way to control the order of startup items in Leopard as you can in Panther.
2) Spotlight: Some people must think this is the greatest thing since the Mac came out ... me?? I ABSOLUTELY HATE IT!! First, how do I get the Spotlight icon out of the right corner of the menu bar??? Second, how do I get Spotlight to come up in its own window when I press cmd-F??? Third, how do I get a nice simple FIND setup like I have in Panther?????? Apple has taken something that has been simple and quick for 20yrs and turned it into a complex glop with a steep learning curve. If it isn't simple, quick and easy to use right now, I don't want it!!

Answer 1

I REALLY want a FAST SIMPLE INTUITIVE Find function
Click the Spotlight icon in the menu bar and type something. That's about as simple as it gets. Since everything is indexed, and Spotlight consults an index, it is also very fast. Seems intuitive to me. If you want to see the results in a window, click on Show All at the very top of the results list. You can then amend the search results, for instance click the Kind column to arrange by kind. Change the search word. Add a criterion, so you can exclude Safari history items for instance. Thus if I do a search the word easter, then click the Show All, I get a Spotlight window displaying 1, 261 items on all my drives, including things like "middle eastern oud.caf"--surrounding the word easter with quotes eliminates that sort of thing, and clicking on my startup drive's name eliminates all the extraneous stuff on backup drives. Down to 197 items. I'm not interested in Safari History items so I can click the plus button, select "Spotlight items" from the drop down menu, and "don't include"--down to 163 items. I really don't want to look at html pages, so I amend Search for to:
"easter" NOT html
And I'm down to 26 items, consisting of graphics files, text files, movies, folders, an alias, a couple of web location files, and, of all things, a "Ruby Source File" called goodfriday.rb (wonder what in the world that is?). I can easily see that what I'm looking for isn't there, perhaps the alias to a folder called "Easter" will have the movie I'm looking for. Double click, opens the folder (which is located on a backup drive), and sure enough there's the movie I want and all the files used to create it. Made it 2 years ago, took a lot of space, so I evidently decided not to keep a copy of my startup drive.
All this exercise is really trying to do is point out that you can do whatever you want with Spotlight, from extremely simple, fast and intuitive, to very selective. While I have some very big complaints about the GUI they settled on for Leopard, I think the underlying functionality is the greatest thing since sliced bread. You DO have to learn some stuff to get to the really good parts, but the basic Spotlight search from the menu bar is pretty dang good.
Francine
Francine
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