I little while ago I talked about some of the user interface horrors packed into Spotlight. This time around I'm going to put my money where my mouth is and offer an alternative design. Here is a Spotlight 2 UI I knocked up in Photoshop in an hour or so: Clicky the image for full size version. So why is this design better? First off it builds on familiarity, the Finder has a source list, iTunes has a source list, every man and his dog has a source list. Spotlight should have one too! More importantly this removes those weird collapsable blue bar things. It makes sense to break the source list down by file types as they are a nice clearly defined, finite group. It's also pretty unlikely you want to search for documents of different types with the same name so there is no real loss in not offering a view with all file types shown at once. You could always include an 'All types' item at the top of the source list if this was a big concern though. The big icons won't appeal to everyone, but there's no reason why dragging the splitter to left shouldn't reduce the icons down to say 16x16 pixels. I broke the items up into three related groups (well as best I could) to help keep things organised. The number of search results for each type is shown in a circle to the right of the item. This replaces the useless total results number that used to be displayed by the search field. The main results table is now a standard Cocoa table, which means the user gets such niceties as being able to sort the results in ascending or descending order by clicking the relevant table column. This is vastly better than the weird group of pseudo-hyperlink radio button things we had previously. Notice also that we actually now see the relevance by each item, something Spotlight currently feels you don't need to know about, which is kind of annoying when you do a search and get back 100 files with meaningless filenames. Notice I added a little Safari downloads style magnifying glass icon by each item so you can reveal it without having to delve into a contextual menu? Granted the use of the magnifying glass icon could cause some confusion here, what with it being the spotlight icon and all, but blame Apple for giving two different meanings to the same icon. I decided to move the 'get info' shortcut into the toolbar and not place it by each result as you probably want to reveal a file in the file system much more frequently than you want to see its 'get info' details. I've moved the 'where' group into the toolbar area where it sits neatly above the source list. Again further removing the need for the grey bar of items. It might be nice to show the various icons associated with each search location here, but the unified pop-up button I nabbed from iTunes was a tad too skinny for icons. It's been suggested to me that these options could actually be packed into the search field itself (like Mail used to do, before it was 'improved') which is a neat idea. To toggle between list and icon/preview mode I've put a unified style mode button in the toolbar, akin to the one in the Finder. For the images category a slideshow icon would appear next to these two modes. There isn't much point showing it all the time as it's only relevant for that one file type. A few other changes I'd make would be making the spotlight window part of the Finder, and thus making it behave like a normal window. Of course I'd make the Finder unified too while I was at it, but that's another story ^_^;