Spotlight in Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard): Bug with editable file name is a ‘known issue’

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
March 5th, 2008 • 8:59 am

I am asking you. If you submitted a bug report to Microsoft (or Adobe, for that matter) regarding a fairly important bug in a central feature of their software, would you get a reply by e-mail within less than 12 hours confirming that it is a bug, that they know about it, and that they are working on a fix?

Yet this is exactly what happened with the bug report that I submitted yesterday about this fairly significant bug in Spotlight’s search results windows in the Finder, which can have fairly destructive consequences.

I’ve already been told in an e-mail that this bug “has been filed in our bug database under the original Bug ID# 5664473” and that it is “currently being investigated.”

This still does not tell us when we might get a fix, but it is reassuring just the same.

If this were Microsoft, they probably wouldn’t process the bug report for another two weeks —assuming that they do actually have a process facility to process bug reports from users. Last I checked, they still didn’t. A generic “Send us your feedback” feature with no traceability and that requires the user to check a box saying “I understand that I will not be contacted in response to my feedback” does not qualify, needless to say.

And if they did process the bug report, they probably would file it under “Things to be fixed within the next millennium” and promptly forget about it. That, in any case, is the only plausible explanation for the sorry state of affairs regarding Microsoft’s software for Mac OS X.

Apple, on the other hand, does provide some level of responsiveness, as this particular incident indicates. Their products are not bug-free, far from it, but they work reasonably well, and bug reports are received and processed and do lead to bug fixes and improvements. That is, simply put, the way it should be.


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