I’ve had to use a MacOSX 10.3 laptop for a little while this week, to get it set up to run as a temporary CAREO server. What struck me is that while I was using the laptop, just how much I missed Dashboard and Spotlight. If you’d have asked me, I would have said I didn’t use them much, nor did I care that much about them.
But, take them away, and boy do I notice. I kept hitting command+space to find apps and files, but nothing happened. F12 didn’t do anything. Frustrating 
After the latest MacOSX 10.4.2 update (which seems to have made Spotlight MUCH faster, and make Dashboard use MUCH less resources), I find I’m actually using Dashboard quite a bit now, to check temperature/weather, check GMail account, and now to indulge my strange craving to keep tabs on a few webcams. And, I’m using Spotlight all the time – from a simple app launcher to full content index file locator.
