Some nifty intelligence in OSX

I’ve been marveling about a very nifty piece of intelligence I recently discovered in the Mac OSX operating system. When I activate Spotlight (Mac’s global search tool), it’s easy to unintentionally roll the mouse off the ‘hit’ area and deactivate Spotlight (see the video below). However, if I move my mouse back to the Spotlight button, I have indicated to the operating system that I/it made a mistake by deactivating Spotlight. And this is the devilishly-simple-but-ingenious part: the system realises this and will not allow me/it to make the same mistake again during this interaction; I now have to click to deactivate Spotlight, a simple roll-out won’t suffice.

Check out this screen capture of the feature in action – in the first attempt I accidentally roll over the ‘Darryl Gray’ menu. I then reactivate Spotlight and try the exact same thing again:

Brilliant!

But it gets even better: I have been showing this feature to a bunch of colleagues, demonstrating the simple-but-cool artificial intelligence involved. But because I have now ‘accidentally’ deactivated Spotlight on so many occasions, my computer thinks I am such a dullard that it will no longer allow me to deactivate Spotlight via mouse roll-out. It has revoked this simple feature because it is clearly well beyond my hand-eye coordination abilities. Fantastic!

This simple feature will have saved thousands—probably millions—of moments of annoyance. It could easily be done using JavaScript in the web world too. So why don’t we see this kind of stuff more often?

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