Adam Engst, writing for TidBITS:
All too often, I give up trying to tap my way through Settings and instead pull down to reveal the Search field, before remembering that searches in Settings often fail.
And:
It’s worse even than the System Preferences app in macOS, which at least shows all preference panes without the need to scroll. In fact, System Preferences points to the simple way Apple could rearrange the Settings app to make it easier to navigate.
Did you know that when System Preferences is the frontmost app on the Mac, you can go to the menu bar and choose View > Organize Alphabetically? And it does!
This is a growing pains problem. An interface approach that works well when something is small falls apart when the set of elements being organized grows too big. At some point, a second (and even third) layer of organization is required. And it does not help when all the various organizational methods are wildly inconsistent.
Adam suggests offering a second level “view by” scheme that supports an alphabetical sort of settings. I think this is a step in the right direction, but I’d take this one step further.
I’d suggest that Apple take a look at every single sorting and searching problem in macOS and iOS and consider re-rolling all of them to make them consistent. The end result would have the user learn one basic approach and instantly translate that knowledge throughout the ecosystem.
As is, it is all a bit bewildering.
Gods yes. I’ve got this weird bug on my iPhone when I upgrade my OS – my iCloud Music Library stops working even though it is selected as on. It happens 3-4 a year.
The fix involves doing a couple of things in the prefs. Even though I’ve done it a few times I spent about 20 minutes last week going through the prefs and digging around online trying to find the right things to do.
I finally wrote down the detailed steps and saved them in Bear for the next time. I’m not peeved about the bug, it’s a minor issue. I’m irritated that it took so long to figure out, yet again.
Find and Spotlight have rarely worked well for me in macOS, regardless of context or specific OS version. I get better results with third-party software like NeoFinder (for catalogued disks) or Devon’s EasyFind. I just take this as a normal part of working on a Mac.
Its gotten worse on the Mac. Sometimes things sort by type, sometimes by name, sometimes it searches the system files and sometimes it doesn’t.. I’m sure part of this is “operator error”, but bewildering it is… at least for me.
Searching in MacOS is so annoying.
if I am in a folder and do a search, I want to search the folder, not the whole disk, and I want to have the default be to search for the filename! I rarely search for a document by the text within a document, and yet that seems to be the unchangeable default setting. Filtering the search by adding constraints is so awkward, and all of these problems have been around forever…
And while I am ranting, why can’t the columns in the finder shrink to the shortest name in the column, so I don’t have to side scroll when I am moving files up the hierarchy?
The last point, that’s where learning how to use basic terminal commands comes in handy. No need to do weird side-scrolling drag and drops. That or get Yoink, a third-party utility app where you can drag files in temporarily to help with drag and drop operations.
For your first point, there is a preference for that. If I recall, its open a folder, then go to Finder -> Preferences and one of the tabs has “Search This Folder”, “Search This Mac” and I think one other option you can choose.I seem to recall there is a Cmd or Opt toggle you can use as well in the search box, but that be just my own hopefulness.
I very much like your idea of pulling all the various search techniques together across Mac and iOS and using iCloud to keep track of how a user is using search.
I’ve been using Alfred on the Mac for years. It at least learns what I search for often and predicts it.
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Or maybe Apple could just fix an obvious bug that has been there for over 5 years. The whole point of MacOS was to make the terminal unnecessary , at least for everyday stuff.
Thanks for that one!