How Find should work

For years, Find has marked its matches by highlighting the text it finds. This was great in 1980 with black and white screens, where highlighting meant inverting. It was even decent in 1990, where multi-color text on a white background was the norm, and the highlighting meant changing the background color. But in today’s era of ransom note-like text, where it’s quite possible that the web page’s background consists of many background colors (including, quite possibly, the highlight color) it just isn’t enough to grab the eye.

Back in the 1990s, Apple had a solution to this for their help system.

That would be a great model for Find. However, we can do even better. Seen how System Preferences on Tiger works yet?

So here’s how Find should work (screenshot produced by blending a “normal” screenshot from OmniWeb with one manipulated with OmniDazzle). It’s pretty clear what was found, isn’t it?

Now, I’m not meaning to pick on OmniWeb in particular. Safari should do this. Text Wrangler should do this. Xcode should do this. For that matter, every application with a Find command should probably do this. We’ve had the technology for years. It’s time to use it to make life easier for users. C’mon Apple. Make this easy for us.