The Apple Mac world was, as usual, pumped up with adrenaline yesterday awaiting the keynote from Steve Jobs at the Developers Conference and expecting great things. Of particular interest to me, as I have little interest in the much anticipated iPhone, were the as-yet unannounced and ’secret’ new features of the forthcoming Leopard – or OSX 10.5.

To put it mildly, general consensus from the techie press this morning, now that the keynote has been properly evaluated, seems to be one of immense disappointment – the first time I have seen a Jobs presentation so heavily criticised since I switched to Macs back in 2004. But there are two ‘missing’ features from the Leopard roll-call that seem to have not been mentioned by most – if any.

The first – Finder – gets a mention as at least it has undergone a face-lift but I don’t see anything actually that useful. Cosmetic yes – but useful? Apple has failed consistently (in my experience to date) to actually turn Finder into the tool it needs to be and all that Leopard seems to be adding is eye-candy. But it is the other omission that seems to have gone unnoticed and a look at the new Leopard Features web pages doesn’t seem to even give it a mention. And that is Spotlight.

Introduced with much fanfare and hype in Tiger, Spotlight, the indexing and search tool, is a total mess and disaster. OK it finds stuff, but the way the data is presented ought to receive awards for one of the worse UI’s ever developed. It really is unusable and I resent the space it even takes up on my menubar yet alone the background processing that is going on for which Apple have failed to give me a switch to turn off.

Yet Spotlight, given a usable interface, could be such an excellent and useful tool. Sad then that it appears to have been ignored. Unless, of course, it is still a secret!

So looks like when Leopard hits, I’ll be sticking with the excellent Path Finder for both jobs.