Spotlight Sort Options

While Spotlight in Mac OS X 10.5 is greatly improved, there is one area in which it has regressed to an unusable state. Sort options in Leopard's Spotlight are limited to only three fields: Name, Kind and Last Opened. Uh... This is bad, guys...

Leopard's Spotlight Sort Options: Last Opened? Lame!

For most quickie finds I'll usually turn to the Spotlight menubar item. And this usually gets the job done. But every now and then I need to create a more complex search, and for that I'll typically turn to the "command-f" Finder method. Again, there are many useful advantages in Leopard over Tiger when it comes to this sort of search, most notably the nested search properties. These allow Spotlight in Leopard to create searches of Byzantine complexity. Astoundingly, the results will only be sortable by the aforementioned criteria. Need to look at your "Date Created" search by "Date Created?" Too bad. Guess you're shit out of luck.

Smart folders never looked so dumb.

This has been posted about The Internets for some time now, mentioned recently in this fine MacOSXHints post, and now listed as one of that site's author's most glaring problems in Leopard. I must admit, I haven't needed this functionality until recently — very late in Leopard's release — which is why I'm only noticing it now. But boy, when you do need it, it's shocking to discover this constraint in an otherwise greatly improved tool.

It kills me when a company takes one step forward and another back like this. I really hope Apple fixes this shortcoming sooner rather than later.