Bona-Fide Good Stuff
There’s a new feature in Leopard. It has to do with the “Help” menu, and not just in Apple programs like the Finder or iTunes, but the “Help” menu in any application, including Microsoft Office 2004. You click on the “Help” menu in the top menu bar and along with the regular options, you get a Spotlight search field.
For those who don’t know, Spotlight is the search application in Mac OS X. It’s anchored in the top-right corner of the menu bar, so no matter what you’re working on, it’s always at your fingertips (easy mouse access; easy keyboard access).
You know it’s a Spotlight search field because there’s a blue bar around it, the same blue bar that you see when you click the system-wide Spotlight menu. This has the effect of telling the user that the search they’re about to run is not any old search, but a Spotlight search.
In Tiger, this meant a search that was significantly slower than Google, and a search experience that sucked. But after using Leopard for less than a week, I can tell you that Spotlight’s blue bar means something completely different now. Spotlight is now as fast as advertised. It’s even fast enough to serve as a real-world application launcher (it’s just as fast as Quicksilver, for those who use Quicksilver). All you have to do is type “Command-Space” (Spotlight’s keyboard shortcut), then type in the first few letters of the application you want to run and hit “Return.” Simple. You don’t even have to look at the Spotlight menu to make sure it’s found the right application, ’cause it always does. Type “Command-Space,” the first few letters, and “Return.” Done. Application launched. In Tiger, the same keyboard combination would leave you with enough time to brew a cup of cappuccino. At Starbucks. Two blocks down the street. And when you returned, maybe, just maybe, it found what you were looking for.
So yeah, when that blue bar pops up at the top of the “Help” menu, you think to yourself, “Nice,” ’cause you know Spotlight finds what you’re looking for and finds it fast.
And that’s when you realize that the search field already has a blinking cursor in it. You don’t even need to click twice to search. Just click “Help” and start typing. They didn’t need to do that. The cursor didn’t need to be there. The blue bar already made you commit to searching. But now that it’s there, you think to yourself, “Well, wasn’t that nice of them.”
So you’ve seen the blue bar, you’ve appreciated the cursor, you typed in your search term, and then what? Well, that’s when you get triply impressed, because if your search term matches any menu item in the application (and again, we’re talking EVERY application here, not just iTunes or whatever), then Leopard pops open the relevant menu and a huge, blue arrow shows you what item you should click on.
Perhaps you’re one of those people who would think this is annoying, but you have to realize that the huge arrow is hovering, and by hovering, I mean it’s moving. It’s not just a static arrow pointing at something, which would seem heavy-handed and authoritarian, like the computer was saying, “It’s right there, stupid.” No, it doesn’t do that. Instead, it hovers. It makes a kind of wavy rotation next to whatever it’s showing you, almost as if it’s floating on air, like an angel. The movement is quiet and subtle, but it’s there.
This hovering blue arrow has three effects. One, it solves your immediate problem. Two, it shows you how you can solve the problem on your own in the future. And three, because the experience is so enjoyable (the hovering arrow actually makes you happy it exists, unlike a certain animated paperclip I could mention), you become more willing to use the “Help” menu in the future, thereby lessening your overall frustration with computers (well, Apple computers, anyway).
They didn’t have to do that. By itself, a search-field in the “Help” menu is not going to sell any more computers. Nor is an angelic blue arrow. Apple’s OS team could have done absolutely nothing to the “Help” menu in Leopard and very few users (if any) would have noticed.
Instead, they improved the experience. They didn’t improve the way they write support documents (Apple’s “Help” documents are still too “advertisey” for my taste), and they didn’t rest on the improved speed of Spotlight (which in itself would have been a tremendously useful improvement). No, they went further. With the blinking cursor, the menu item detection, and the hovering arrow, they actually took the time to improve the user experience.
It’s really quite brilliant, and I think the Apple employees responsible for it deserve to be be congratulated.
Now, about those goddamned stacks…