Spotlight on Sam & Dave: Spotlight Search Tips
- You Cant Use It If You Cant Find It
- Spotlight Menu: Its Fast, Easy, and Always There
- Open Your Top Hit Fast
- Get Smarter with Just One Click
- Daniel Webster Would be Jealous
- Break the Top 20 Barrier
- Put Some Limits on Spotlight
- See What You Wanna See
- Change the Order of the Results
- Use Quick Look to Be Sure You Have the Right File
- Spotlight Window
- Refine Your Searches in Spotlight Window
- Add Items to the Search Criteria pop-up Menus
- Saving Spotlight Searches as Smart Folders
- Power Searching Is, Uhhhh, Powerful
- Sometimes Less Can Be More
- I Search, Therefore I Find
- A Little Help With More Complicated Searches
- Dont Know the Exact Filename? No Problem
- Sometimes Its Whats Inside That Counts
- Avoiding Junk Search Results
- Search Inside Your Photoshop Documents
- Spotlight Menu Versus Spotlight Window
- Searching the System Preferences
- Opening? Saving? Spotlight Will Help
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
If there was ever a product that richly deserved its own chapter, it’s Leopard’s amazing Spotlight search feature. That’s because we spend a ton of our time searching for things on our Macs. Why? Because we don’t know where anything is. Ever. Take my car keys, for example. You might as well take them, because I generally have no idea where they are. For some reason I can clearly remember undocumented keyboard shortcuts from Mac OS 7.1, but I have no idea where I laid my car keys last night. You know what I need? I need Spotlight outside my Mac, in my regular life. I would just type in “car keys” and it would say “in the kitchen, just to the left of the bowl of fruit” or, more likely, “they’re still in the ignition.” So, how does the name of this chapter, “Spotlight on Sam & Dave,” fit in? Well, that’s the hook from the classic oldie “Sweet Soul Music” by an artist named Arthur Conley. In the song, he “spotlights” other singers, like James Brown and Otis Redding.
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You Can’t Use It If You Can’t Find It
One of the most important features of any operating system is the ability to search the contents of your storage devices and find the files you need. Hard drives are getting bigger all the time, which is good because we keep filling them up. But bigger drives mean there are more places for your files to hide. Some operating systems use a little dog to distract you while it finds the file you need. Leopard doesn’t have a dog, but it does have a search engine, Spotlight, that kicks butt. Spotlight was introduced in Tiger, but has undergone a major upgrade in Leopard. Every time you do a search you’re using Spotlight, but it has a couple of different “doors,” depending on where you are and what type of information you want to retrieve. I’m telling you, Spotlight rocks with a funky beat and is going to be your new best friend.
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