OS X 10.4.1 Mail Update and Spotlight

It appears as if the first point-release of OS X has fixed my biggest gripe about Tiger: Mail.app 2.0 no longer breaks attachments to Windows users. This issue is far from resolved, though. We’re back to Mail.app 1.0 in Jaguar days: you have to add your attachments to the end of your message or your text gets split. You’ll end up with your Windows friends seeing email from you in pieces: The message window will display the first part of your message, and attached to it will be your attachment, and another attachment that contains the bottom half of your email, like a signature file, for example. If you make sure that your attachments are at the very bottom of your message, no such split occurs. This is an improvement, don’t get me wrong. In 10.4.0, attachments would get split up into component parts and renamed to something bizarre that leads your recipients the believe that you’re proffering viruses. So, for this reason alone, 10.4.1 is a must-have update for Mail.app users who wish to communicate with the other 95% of the connected world. Spotlight I love Spotlight. I use it as a complete replacement for QuickSilver, which I also loved, but was too kludgy for to get used to quick launches. But I was searching for a folder that I hadn’t opened in some time the other day. The title of the folder was “00 Work in Progress” and no matter how many characters I’d drop into Spotlight, it wouldn’t show. I started looking for other stuff… music, pictures, everything. Nada. Only the files and folders that I’d opened manually since first installing Tiger were indexed. Oh, and Applications were indexed, too, so I’d never noticed anything funny about app launches. Crusing around MacOSXhints.com I found this little beauty. Opened my Terminal window and typed:

sudo mdutil -E /

It took about 30 minutes to reindex and appears to now have everything I need in there. I’m still wondering about iPhoto images, though, as keyword searches aren’t coming up accurately. This hint may fix it. Still, as much as I love Spotlight again, there are a few things about it that are bugging me. I didn’t know they were bugging me until I installed the newly released MSN Desktop Search for Windows at work. While Spotlight has this great invisible feel to it, I’m always left wondering if it’s really looking out for me… if it has my best interests at heart. With MSN, you right click on the suspiciously Spotlight-looking magnifying glass in the system tray and click “Indexing Status” to get a pop-up telling you not only that you’re in the middle of an index, but of exactly what files are being indexed at that moment, how many files have been indexed in that session, and how many are left. You have a snooze button to free up resources if you have work to do, close to get rid of the window, and an “Index Now” button to update the index volume. “Index Now”. That there is quite a novelty, and it’s something Apple should have considered in their implementation. I have a number of recent switchers to think about and as newbies, when Spotlight doesn’t do what it says, they’re not going to be able to figure out the Terminal workaround on their own. It’ll just be broken. Anyhow, 10.4.1 was worth it. Spotlight is fixed. I think that does it for all my initial Tiger install gripes, and I can finally get back to thinking about Star Wars: ROTS.

Buzz

I’ve been doing a ton of reading on buzz — and the art of it — lately. It’s been an interesting journey for me because I’m really tragically connected to cost-per-lead marketing and our word of mouth sources are tough to categorize. I’m on the record as a bona fide hater of word of mouth, as a matter of cold hard fact, as it’s been so very in the way of all my other marketing projects over the past two years. Color me transformed. Three months ago, the entire organization reorganized. The big(tm) budget I managed for our region was centralized to our corporate marketing office, leaving me a whole lot more time for tiddly winks, cross words, melancholy and porn, natch. Somewhere in there, I started listening more intently to buzz marketing folks and their points are making crystal clear sense to me now more than ever. One of them says that the amount of buzz your product or service generates is directly related to the amount of new information your producing about it. Take Apple, for example: over the past three OS releases, they always produce a list of “X new features”. In Tiger, it’s 200. In Panther, I think it was 150. In both releases, enormous buzz. I proofed a brochure the other day from our corporate relations team. It was pretty, as most of their material is. But it shows a distinct ignorance to what’s going on in the market. The copy listed exactly the same verbiage we’ve been using for over a year. The standard copy we used to rely on in yearly cycles is growing stale faster than ever, and our word of mouth buzz is falling even faster than that. I wrote an email to the team with suggestions. I doubt changes will be made, but here’s hoping. The tragedy of the commons in this case is that we’re so huge as an organization now that we’ve forgotten how to put our ears to the ground to hear the hooves rumbling behind us. In most cases, and here’s the bigger tragedy, when we do finally get the ears down, the rumbling has already passed. Challenge: How to re-engage a monolithic organization with fantasies of decentralization in grass roots buzz generation?