In the early days, my first forays into the online world included searching for stuff using Gopher. You could even use it via the command line, so it’s really old. As browsers became more popular and the web became easier to use, Gopher fell into disuse, although it’s still being maintained by some mainstays. According to Wikipedia, there are but 100 Gopher servers left, and they aren’t really being regularly updated.

My early online visits focused on AOL, very much because the service was cheap. But any searching was done within the service until AOL decided we deserved some level of genuine Internet access, so they added FTP, Gopher and even a subpar browser over the years.

I remember what first passed for searching on a Mac in 1998. Apple introduced a little app called Sherlock in Mac OS 8.5. Ahead of using Google, this was one convenient way to do online searches. All right, what became Google began three years earlier, but it took a while before that startup began to grow and ultimately dominate online searching. Indeed much of the search process became browser centric, though I still used Sherlock off and on for a few years.

Nowadays we’ve become lazy in using search tools, so instead of typing the address of a site, if it’s not already bookmarked, you might just “Google” it and click (or tap) on the appropriate link.

Easy.

As an historical footnote, a third-party developer, Karelia Software, introduced a shareware app called Watson, a sort of Sherlock on steroids, which depended on the plug-in concept for extra modules. Apple, in turn, came up with Sherlock 2 that also supported plug-ins. Watson’s days were numbered, the term “Sherlocked” was invented, which referred to Apple creating one of their own apps to compete with — or sometimes destroy — a third-party product.

Apple wanted to make searching for stuff on your Mac more convenient and faster, and so Spotlight was developed. Introduced at the WWDC in 2004, in debuted in OS 10.4 Tiger, and did its duty by indexing your hard drive, or other drives attached to your Mac. After enduring a few hours of slow performance, searches were almost instantaneous, but again strictly local. You wanted to do online searching, you used your favorite browser, and Google got most of the action.

Sherlock was officially retired in OS 10.5 Leopard, released in 2007.

Spotlight was decent enough, though you had to sometimes rebuild the database, which involves a little trickery in System Preferences or the command line (look it up). It’s efficient enough, but beginning with OS X Yosemite, Apple decided to beef up the feature set and have it search a collection of stuff that even incorporated some level of online searching. Apple, however, is using Bing rather than Google for some of those searchers, for reasons that are obvious to anyone who has followed Apple’s ongoing conflicts with the latter.

Safari also integrates to some level with Spotlight, although you’re still getting your traditional web searches, and, yes, you don’t need to use Google if you find their level of targeting ads in your direction too invasive.

In any case, with El Capitan, Spotlight grows more powerful. You can use plain language searching, such as “where did I put those documents on flying squirrels that I wrote last week?” or something similar. From my preliminary encounters with the 10.11 betas, it does seem to work, though I don’t expect perfection. But what it means is that Apple is clearly hoping that you’ll depend more on Spotlight for an integrated search experience that is agnostic about where the data can be found. That way you don’t have to perform separate searches for stuff on your Mac and stuff online.

But I expect most of you don’t use Spotlight all that much, and when you do it’s strictly for local searches on your Mac. You’re probably still accustomed to using your favorite browser, with the default search engine or something else, to find what you want. So the task is split, not so efficient, and I wonder how many Mac users even know Spotlight exists. I know I’ve randomly asked a few people about it, only to get such responses as “Spot-who?”

So it does appear that Apple has to do a little education to get the word out. It’s not that it’s a well-kept secret of course. Spotlight happens to be a tentpole feature in OS X El Capitan and Apple touts not just the plain or natural language searches, but they designed the Spotlight app to function more like other apps, so you can now move and resize the search window. Maybe that’ll help.

Regardless, if you’re not sure about what Spotlight can do on your Mac, try Command-space bar to launch it and go from there. Some people use it strictly to locate and instantly launch apps. But I can see where Apple hopes that widespread adoption of Spotlight will lessen your reliance on Google.

Here’s one that I’ve more or less given a bit of tacit support to. Apple Music was announced at the WWDC and, a little over a week before its debut, one of the top-selling musical artists on the planet complained. Why? Well, it seems that Apple opted not to pay royalties during the 90-day free trial, while offering higher artist royalties for the paid service to compensate. To them, it was a fair deal.

But Taylor Swift said it wasn’t acceptable. Her response was not unique for her. Spotify, which is the current number one music subscription service, essentially blew her off when she complained over their decision not to pay royalties during a 30-day period where customers could sample the paid service. But this is Apple, and the trial period is three times as long, so a lot of potential income could be lost.

Now Swift doesn’t have to worry about her next payday, but she said she was speaking on behalf of the majority of musical artists who are barely surviving.

Well, you know the rest: Apple relented, agreed to pay unspecified royalties during the free sampling period. In a few days, indie artists and labels were signed up. Chalk it up to a victory by the artists against an evil multinational corporation. Or maybe not! Could it possibly be that this whole exercise was staged a la professional wrestling? It sure generated a lot of publicity ahead of the Apple Music launch. Some last-minute drama, perhaps a cliffhanger about what songs won’t be included, and the ones that will, such as “Freedom” from Pharrell Williams.

Spotify would kill for that level of publicity. And yes I know that Wired has already raised such a conspiracy theory.

There are others, about Apple pulling something or other to keep you within their walled garden. But even the walled garden concept is sometimes a little much. Sure, Macs are designed to run OS X, but PCs are designed for Windows, although you can run Linux on either, and Windows on a Mac via Boot Camp, natively, or a virtual machine. So you do have a fair amount of freedom to use your computer as you prefer. You don’t even have to buy software from the Mac App Store.

Sure iOS is more restrictive, although some manage to jailbreak their iPhones and iPads to run software that isn’t allowed at the App Store. You can call the store policies too restrictive, although there’s a rich selection of apps that have survived the review process. I suppose a walled garden does exist here, to some degree, because Apple has taken steps to ensure security. You want more freedom go to Android, but there are regular reports of security leaks on that platform. There has to be balance.

But the main conspiracy is something that supposedly no longer exists, which is the “Reality Distortion Field” generated by Steve Jobs. His very words would lull you into a hypnotic state where you’d buy all the Apple gear you could afford, regardless of quality. Funny, Apple’s sales are higher than ever these days, yet some people still believe that the RDF still exists in some form. So is it being passed over from beyond the grave? Or maybe the RDF was so intense that the effects have yet to wear off, and when they do, Apple is in deep trouble. But what about people who never bought anything with an Apple label until long after Jobs died?

Or maybe the critics are granting Apple too much power to influence people. Maybe it’s all about selling products and services that people actually like and are willing to pay for. Maybe there is no trickery involved. Yes, that must be it.

Yet another conspiracy is planned obsolescence, that Apple deliberately cripples old hardware so features of new operating systems do not work, thus forcing you to buy new Macs. So with the release of Yosemite and all the publicity about the virtues of the Handoff feature, it turned out that many older Macs, mostly made before 2012, didn’t have the native Bluetooth LE hardware required. Even third-party USB-based Bluetooth LE adapters wouldn’t do the trick.

Now I’m not a programmer, so I won’t consider the sort of trickery Apple used to make Handoff work, to make it possible to start a document or message on your Mac and pick it up on another Apple device. My real complaint is that this limitation wasn’t revealed originally, and only programmers who attended WWDC workshops knew about it at first.

This year, Apple’s planned obsolescence feature may be El Capitan’s Metal feature, which allows the OS and apps to integrate tightly with the graphics hardware for a huge potential performance boost. It’s limited to Macs with the proper graphics hardware, mostly dating back to 2012. Again developers know the limitations, but it’s not at all clear from Apple’s public pronouncements or web preview about the new OS.

A conspiracy?

Not really. It’s more about requiring certain hardware so certain features will work properly. If Apple required that all features be available for all Macs that can run El Capitan, which date back to as early as 2007, Metal wouldn’t exist, nor would Handoff. Apple won’t cripple the OS to provide 100% capability for up to eight years. If those older Macs otherwise deliver good performance with the new OS, that’s great, and it keeps them current for another 12 months. No conspiracy there, except perhaps to force fewer people to buy new Macs.

Oh and by the way, iOS 9 supports the same iPhones and iPads as iOS 8. But don’t expect miracles with your iPhone 4s or iPad 2, so maybe you’ll be tempted to buy new gear. But the stuff you have now won’t mysteriously stop working.

As some of you know, I came to the Mac via prepress. By night, I labored as a freelance writer, and by day, and sometimes into the evening, I worked as a typographer in New York City. While the jobs changed, for some curious reason, I always found employment within a few blocks of an area near 5th Avenue and 30th Street in Manhattan.

In any case, the arrival of the Mac changed a lot of things. I had already become comfortable playing with those early personal computers, and had a smattering of knowledge of Basic and DOS, but I was especially pleased to be able to do everything via point and click. Till then, the traditional typesetting computer front-ends I worked on were mostly text-based, and graphical layout schemes were primitive and usually inaccurate. I could usually figure things out better via the command line, but the Mac was a revelation. Finally, there was a proper way to handle graphical interfaces.

With the arrival of Adobe PostScript and laser printers, it was possible to place a prepress operation in your living room, which is where I set up my first home-based Mac. There were two major publishing applications that allowed you to create fully formatted professional calibre documents, and a number of lesser contenders. Of the former, PageMaker came first, designed to mirror the actions of a graphic designer on your computer’s display. So instead of using a physical layout table, you placed the elements of your document on the screen by dragging them into position. The other contender, QuarkXPress, took the typographer’s route, opting for precision, using frames — text and picture boxes — to assemble your layouts.

Over the years, I put together literally thousands of ads and brochures in XPress. Later, I combined my writing skills to prepare manuals for one of the larger American audio manufacturers. I also put together magazines and books for several clients. In case you’re wondering, I still have most of those document files around somewhere, but no current application will read them, even assuming I had a floppy disk drive around to retrieve the data.

In any case, serious publishing professionals largely adopted QuarkXPress. PageMaker, later acquired by Adobe, was slow, buggy and just not precise enough. Printing to high resolution output devices could be inconsistent. I know that I did a number of booklets in PageMaker and learned to tolerate it. Put the emphasis on tolerate. When Quark owned the market, they once attempted a hostile takeover of Adobe without success. Had it succeeded, PageMaker would have been sold off to satisfy antitrust concerns, but the effort was laughed off.

Well, in 1999, Adobe released InDesign 1.0. It was promoted as a totally new app, but the PageMaker lineage was evident in the interface, and it still could be slow and flaky. But it was well integrated with other Adobe apps that were mainstays in the publishing and design worlds, such as Illustrator and Photoshop.

Now Quark Inc. wasn’t without its problems. From bugs to abysmal customer service, it was the app you loved to hate. Much of the blame for these issues fell on CEO Fred Ebrahimi, who was notorious for blaming customers for the company’s failures. In 2002, in response to the poorly-received QuarkXPress 5.0, he bitterly announced, “the Macintosh platform is shrinking,” and went on to suggest customers switch to “something else,” being, of course, Windows.

Over the years, InDesign continued to improve, and it seemed that XPress languished, and more and more designers and publishers decided to adopt InDesign. For a few years, it appeared that Quark’s days in the sun were numbered, although some people, particularly those in the corporate and book publishing industries, continued to use it.

New management helped restore Quark’s reputation, and fairly frequent updates have added a decent amount of new features that answer the needs of publishers. Earlier this year arrived QuarkXPress 2015, with huge across-the-board improvements. Rather than list them all here, I’ll simply point to the company’s full listing. Notable improvements include, at last, full 64-bit support for better performance, enhanced tables, and content variables, including running headers. I’m particularly pleased to discover the ability to import footnotes and endnotes from Word documents; it’s a feature I would have loved to try out when I laid out a long book in the previous version of XPress.

Add to that improved e-book tools, more powerful PDF features, including the ability to create PDF/X-4 files, and you end up with a well-rounded publishing app that will definitely answer the needs of existing XPress users and perhaps dissuade some from jumping ship to InDesign.

As for me, I’ve used the app for more than 25 years, and I’ve long become accustomed to its power and its quirks. XPress 2015 has fewer of the latter. In particularly, it’s no longer apt to crash and burn at uncomfortable moments.

As to InDesign, well, I’d be pleased to give the latest version and try and report back to you readers. Unlike Quark, however, Adobe is often reluctant to grant tech reviewers extended cloud access to write long-term evaluations. I might consider signing up, but access to any documents I create would require keeping up the subscriptions for as long as Adobe Creative Cloud lasts.

I do have projects at hand that were begun in InDesign, which I’d like to update in the new version. But without Adobe’s cooperation, I might just export them to XPress and be done with it.

So the meme playing out in the news media is that Apple, the $700 billion gorilla, was rapidly beaten down by a 25-year-old woman. Well, a woman who just happens to be a multimillionaire rock star and one of the most popular recording artists of the day. But still. All it took was one blog articulately expressing her dissatisfaction with Apple and the decision not to pay musical artists during the free 90-day Apple Music trial.

The story goes that Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior VP for Internet Software and Services, awoke Sunday morning to discover Taylor Swift’s posted complaints about the policy. He got together with CEO Tim Cook and, within hours, changed the royalty structure to include payments for music streaming during the period when customers are sampling Apple Music. Chalk it up as a victory for the little people fighting against an “evil” multinational corporation.

I suppose it’s a good thing that Swift has millions of online followers, and her decision to withhold her newest album, “1989,” from Apple Music clearly had its impact. No doubt Apple was inundated with complaints from her fans, that artists deserve to be paid for their work regardless of whether Apple is getting paid. After all, with billions in the bank, why pawn off the costs of selling this service to the entertainers?

But there may be other forces at work here. Apple, for example, believed that, by offering higher royalty payments, it would compensate for the free trial. But the popularity of a new album may be short-lived, and a new release may be past its peak by the time payments begin, thus resulting in a huge loss of income. The cyclical and unpredictable nature of music sales may not have been considered when Apple’s bean counters looked over this deal in terms of numbers and didn’t consider the gray areas that might hurt a musical artists’s paydays.

In this case though, the happy outcome got Apple and Taylor Swift tens of millions of dollars of free publicity, which will only draw more attention to the Apple Music launch, and her new album. Join folks, since Apple was pushed kicking and screaming into giving entertainers a fair shake.

But this isn’t the first time Apple has done things that gave them a poor rap. Don’t forget the Antennagate scandal of 2010, just weeks after the iPhone 4 was released. Seems if you held it the wrong way, reception quality would deteriorate enough under marginal conditions to lose your connection. Steve Jobs didn’t take it seriously, saying you should just hold the handset differently. But within weeks, Apple was forced to hold a press conference where they assured customers that they tested iPhones in a $100 million facility, and that you could impact reception on any mobile handset depending on how you held it. It was all about the laws of physics.

Besides, if you still didn’t like it, you could return the phone for a refund, or get a free bumper case that would easily resolve the problem. This was a good move, but if Jobs wasn’t so flippant about the matter when he first received customer complaints, Apple wouldn’t have given ammunition to competing companies to use it as evidence to sell their own gear. Of course, such gear had similar problems, but perceptions mean a lot.

In 2012, Apple made a huge deal, at a WWDC, in introducing Maps. This was Apple’s response to Google, and isn’t that 3D Flyover feature absolutely awesome? It turned out that the app was strictly a rough beta, and Cook was soon forced to apologize for raising unreasonable expectations. He also discharged the fellow in charge of the project, Scott Forstall, allegedly because he wouldn’t put his name on that apology. But the failure to deliver surely counted for a lot.

Yes, Apple has been steadily improving Maps since then, but the bad reputation still exists. Even though public transit directions are being added, it’s not enough. Only a few cities will be supported when iOS 9 is released, and Google is way ahead. But if Apple originally introduced Maps as a public beta, inviting you to submit errors, you’d become a participant and not a disgruntled customer. Don’t forget that Google keeps many features in beta for years, although that fact isn’t always mentioned in the media.

Now even when Apple reacts quickly to a problem, the media will still pounce. Take that ill-fated iOS 8.0.1 update, which almost bricked some phones. It’s not the first faulty software update from a major tech company — Microsoft has numerous blots on their record — and Apple pulled the update in a little over an hour. Instructions were posted on how to restore the affected handsets, and the fixed version came out the very next day.

But the media continues to make the problem far worse than it really was, implying it took a lot longer to fix, and impacted a large number of iPhone users. The truth rarely gets in the way.

There are other examples where Apple has misjudged customers, or just made wrong decisions. That won’t change, but in reacting quickly to the complaints over not paying royalties when customers were sampling Apple Music, they did a good thing. They also set a precedent that other companies may be forced to follow if they extend free trial periods to match Apple.