Spotlight on OS X really winds me up because it could be so good but there's so many little irritating things.

The biggest thing that irritates me is inconsistent results: for example, if I type in "V" then I could expect to see VLC, VMware Fusion, FFView and DVD Player come up under Applications. However, if I type in V right now then I only get VLC and DVD Player; Spotlight only shows applications that have been recently accessed and that means, despite opening VMware Fusion 12 hours ago, it's not on the list of results. What's the point of this? I can understand not showing applications if they've not been opened for days but not showing them if they've been unused for 12 hours? That's just stupid.

Inability to learn from results is a pretty big flaw too: nine out of ten times I type "V' I end up selecting and opening VLC but if I have VMware Fusion open (even if I don't open it through Spotlight) then typing V suggests VMware Fusion as the top hit and not VLC. I've never opened VMware Fusion through Spotlight (I type the names of my .vmware files to open them) so why should it be the top hit for "V"? Spotlight should be able to learn my usage patterns and deduce that when I type "V", I want VLC as the top hit each time.

Finally, Spotlight forces you to use search phrases in exact order. By this I mean that if you want Quicktime Player then you can't get it by typing "QT", even though that's a logical abbreviation of the application name. Typing QT will never bring up Quicktime so you have to backspace one and type "Qu" to get it. Ditto trying to use NP for NicePlayer. It also includes file extensions, which is frustrating when I try to open AppZapper - "App" will bring up all recently used applications and so you have to add the "Z" to get AppZapper as the top hit.

Quicksilver does all these things but it's just too unstable on Leopard to use right now, which is a shame.

Speaking of Apple's terrible update handling, this belongs in here.

I trashed Safari a while back (on OS X) because it was misbehaving. Downloaded it from Apple's website and it refused to install, giving me the error message "can only install on 10.5.2 or above" despite me running 10.5.4.

The solution was to use a 3rd party app to extract Safari.app from my OS X 10.5.0 install disc then redownload and reinstall the entire 10.5.4 update in order to update Safari back to the current version. That's possibly the most loving retarded way to force a user to install an application ever.