Spotlight Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Searchlight goes native on the iPhone

by Brett Terpstra (Nov 11th, 2008)

Gravity Applications has released a native iPhone application to complement Searchlight, their remote search application based on Spotlight. Searchlight previously sported an iPhone-optimized web interface, and the native app builds on that. Some noteworthy benefits of the native app include storing ...

Terminal Tips: Disable Spotlight in menu bar

by Cory Bohon (Sep 23rd, 2008)

Are you tired of accidentally opening spotlight by pressing command + space? With this simple Terminal "hack," you can rid your precious menu bar of Spotlight for once and all. Just open Terminal.app (located in /Applications/Utilities/) and type the following command: sudo chmod 0 ...

Searchlight, remote Spotlight on your Mac or iPhone

by Brett Terpstra (Aug 15th, 2008)

Searchlight 2.0 was officially released last week. Searchlight offers remote Spotlight functionality, allowing you to search your computer's files via a web browser, and it includes an iPhone-optimized interface. I talked with Searchlight's authors, Gravity Applications, during WWDC and got a good ...

Mac 101: Spotlight, your application-launching pal

by Michael Rose (Aug 12th, 2008)

More Mac 101, our series of tips and tricks for new and returning Mac users. Love it or hate it, Spotlight's ubiquitous search has changed the Mac OS X experience; quick and (mostly) reliable full-text indexing is now part of the landscape. It's not just for finding files, however; did you know that ...

Mac 101: organize Spotlight results

by Scott McNulty (Jul 30th, 2008)

Welcome to another entry in our series for new Mac users: Mac 101. This installment brings us to the preference panel of Spotlight, OS X's integrated search that makes finding that needle in your hard drive's haystack as easy as pie (clearly, it doesn't protect against mixed metaphors). You're ...

TUAW Tip: exclude your Time Machine disk from Spotlight indexing

by Scott McNulty (Jul 29th, 2008)

Just the other day I noticed an odd thing: the Spotlight magnifying glass on my MacBook Pro had that little pulsating dot in it that means it is indexing something. That was odd, since I hadn't added any large files to my Mac, nor had I connected an external harddrive. Or did I? As you might be ...

Precipitate: search Google Docs and Bookmarks from Spotlight

by Mat Lu (Jul 9th, 2008)

Google's Mac group has released Precipitate, a plugin which allows you to search Google Docs and Google Bookmarks from the same interface that you search you Mac. It works with both Spotlight and Google Desktop for Mac. Basically the developer's idea is to have a one stop search interface for ...

Mac 101: Tag almost anything in Leopard

by Dave Caolo (May 5th, 2008)

Here's a very simple and even more useful tip from Dennis Best. He's thought of a clever way to tag almost any document he creates in Leopard with Spotlight and a clever use of keywords. When writing a note, composing an email message, etc., he precedes keywords with the ° bullet character ...

Leap 1.0: a peek under the hood

by Brett Terpstra (Mar 3rd, 2008)

Some applications remind me of cars. For example, most Java based applications are Volkswagen Things as they're useful in certain situations, but horrifying (or hilarious) to look at. But once in a while you get a Jaguar XJS: a beautiful exterior that doesn't bely its underlying power. That, and you ...

A (slightly) simpler command-line Spotlight search

by Brett Terpstra (Jan 4th, 2008)

Erica mentioned mdfind a little while ago. It's not a brand new tool, but there hasn't been a great deal of discussion surrounding it. For shell scripters and Terminal junkies, it's a goldmine of search goodness that can make you never want to key out find . -name "letsgogetcoffeewhilewewait.rb" or ...

FileSpot 2.1 released: Supercharged Spotlight interface

by Brett Terpstra (Dec 29th, 2007)

Synthesis Studios has released version 2.1 of FileSpot (formerly MoRU), their advanced interface for Spotlight. It allows you to make advanced, boolean logic queries and makes accessible some of the more complex aspects of Spotlight. Not to make it sound complicated, though, its iTunes-ish interface ...

DEVONthink gains Spotlight support

by Mat Lu (Dec 20th, 2007)

The guys over at DEVONtechnologies have announced updates for a number of their applications. Most importantly the entire line of DEVONthink information managing software (along with DEVONnote) now natively support Spotlight. They note that this allows you to search multiple DEVONthink Pro databases ...

Leopard killed these freeware apps?

by Mike Schramm (Dec 13th, 2007)

Here's an interesting list of applications supposedly killed by Leopard. There's no question that there's a huge amount of functionality in Leopard that was taken care of in Tiger by third-party apps (and this is just a list of freeware-- commenters pointed out last week that Jisho was made almost ...

TUAW Tip: Power searching in Leopard Mail

by Mat Lu (Dec 8th, 2007)

Over at Mac OS X Hints, johnga1t has discovered that Leopard's Mail.app has a more powerful search functionality than is apparent on the surface. Basically, it seems that Mail.app's search box can leverage some of the power of the new, more sophisticated Spotlight syntax, which means you can now ...

Spotlight in 10.5 skips over user Library files

by Michael Rose (Nov 13th, 2007)

Wondering why your Adium chat logs aren't showing up in Spotlight search now that you're running Leopard? Vincent Noel was wondering, and he tracked down the reason: files in your user ~/Library folder are now not reported by Spotlight, unless you enable "Include" to show system files (easiest way: ...