I just can't believe how bad Leopard is. After two major updates I figured maybe they would have fixed it, but Spotlight is now even more useless than it was in Tiger. I cannot even instruct it to only search one or two volumes so now it searches all my volumes, all my 'network shares' (whatever the hell that means - does it mean mounted network servers, or all publicly searchable folders, or only the computer names?) or only the Home folder. Useless. If I do a network search 5 times, I get 5 different lists of results. Searching for a filename the first time might give me 6 results, then 25 the next time, then 102 the next time, then 12 the next. There is absolutely no feedback given to tell if the search has finished or is still in progress. Still can't re-order the columns in Spotlight searches, and the lack of file size or other info makes it feel like a phillips screwdriver when you only have blade screws. ie completely useless. The bottom panel of Spotlight searches 'giv...me..resul..like thi..so..I cannot f..nd anth...ing..way' Can you read that? No, me neither.

I have three A4 pages full of bugs that are still present in Leopard 10.5.2. However nobody has the slightest interest in trying to fix them, and if I put comments on Apple's discussion forums they are always quickly and silently removed.

The first time I saw Leopard with its stupid small-text sidebars full of useless items (unlike the fully customisable ones in Panther) I had a sense of deja vu but couldn't remember why. Then this weekend I had to do a job in an office full of Windows Vista computers. Leopard has an almost identical copy of Vista's sidebars, but unlike Leopard, Vista's ones can be fully customised to make them more useful. Vista also had this horrible Transparency feature which gave 3 out of the 7 people in the office headaches, but it was always easy to turn off, unlike Leopard which took 2 system updates to fix the transparent menu bars. And I still can't change the menu fonts or font size, so three of my elderly clients had to move from OS9 to Windows XP, because OS9 was fully configurable but OSX is not, and they simply cannot read small fonts. It's not their fault, but Apple has lost them as customers due to their short-sightedness (excuse the pun).

Apple, I bought my first Windows XP machine this year because you made Tiger useless to me, but now Leopard is even more useless. Will you ever fix Spotlight and bring back the old Find File? If you don't, then I'll not be coming back to the Mac platform, and you can guarantee that the next time I have an office of 200 computers needing upgrades I will NOT be recommending they replace them with Macs. This is coming from somebody who has been consulting in the Mac community for more than 15 years and used to run a BBS for an Apple User Group. I have twelve Mac computers in this household, but your buggy, lacking software has lost me, possibly forever.