I agree that there are a number of outstanding inconsistencies in Mac OS X that are most definitely related to the Carbon vs. Cocoa paradigm. But in many cases it’s mostly because the Carbon developers haven’t bothered to fix their applications. It’s not because of a technical limitation in Carbon.

This particular issue with Spotlight, on the other hand, might be a more challenging technical issue. At least that’s what you have to assume to explain why Apple’s own engineers have allowed this glaring problem to remain unaddressed.

I should also note the problem is more widespread with Carbon applications. For example, you can have the I-beam cursor blinking in a Word 2004 document and in Spotlight at the same time.

Many things are worse and more widespread in Carbon, and many default behaviors are also different. For example, I find it EXTREMELY annoying how Carbon applications tend to capture my scroll wheel actions and apply it to the primary window, even when I’m not hovering over it (as you probably know, Cocoa (and actually, most Windows) applications tend to favor hover-scroll interaction). This is compounded by the fact that one of my girlfriend’s late pet rats chewed part of my scroll wheel, so there are times when I want to scroll it simply to “fix” its position under my finger, but my document moves up and down as a result. I see this most often in Word and Photoshop, the two non-Apple Carbon applications I use most frequently (though not necessarily in that order).

I agree that the core foundation of Spotlight is good—although it does not support Match Case or Exact String (for multiple-word phrases) searching, which is a major limitation. But the UI most definitely sucks in numerous ways. It’s highly disappointing.

BTW… “gree colours?” Everyone knows there’s no “u” in “color.” ;)

This particular annoyance though seems to come from Apples own confusion, Spotlight is behaving correctly, in a ‘layer’ above the OS, it’s even part of the Finder, in a similar way that dashboard works in a layer ‘below’ the OS. Above and Below in this context is purely descriptive

Not that it matters. The very fact that this kind of problem is allowed to exist is a major issue. And even without the focus on the text field, the fact that many other controls remain in the foreground is still confusing.