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SpotInside: A Solid Spotlight Alternative

Written on July 28, 2009 by Charles Moore and 12 people have commented

I have a love-hate relationship with Spotlight, OS X’s convenient and useful, but immensely frustrating search utility. Apple introduced Spotlight with OS X 10.4 Tiger, and tweaked it considerably in OS 10.5 Leopard.
Having a search engine ready and waiting all the time is seductive, and Spotlight is nice to have, but falls short of Apple’s [...]

Apple Puts Spotlight on Indie Acts in iTunes

Written on February 25, 2009 by Darrell Etherington and 3 people have commented

This must be “Update iTunes Content” week at Cupertino or something, because Apple keeps making changes to the music player. First it introduced iTunes Pass, which provides superfans with heaps of exclusive content released on a staggered schedule over a brief subscription period, and now it’s launched the Indie Spotlight.
The Spotlight is a new subcategory [...]

Find Any File: Classic Mac Filename Searches Return to OS X

Written on February 02, 2009 by Charles Moore and 4 people have commented

I quickly became addicted to Spotlight when I upgraded to Tiger back in 2005, but why, I wondered, did Apple have to ruin easy filename searches in the Tiger Find dialog, after just finally getting them working right in Panther?
Of course you can run filename searches in Tiger (and Leopard), but it involves configuring tedious [...]

5 Things You Never Knew About Spotlight

Written on December 03, 2008 by Lisa Hoover and 31 people have commented

Many people use Quicksilver as a replacement for Spotlight, but if you’re happy with the native file search and app launcher in Mac OS X, then why change? You probably know that you can access Spotlight quickly with the Command-spacebar keyboard shortcut, but here are a few more tricks you might not know exist.

Spotlight makes [...]

Bring Spotlight To The Cloud With Precipitate

Written on September 24, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 1 person has commented

If you are a heavy user of either Google Bookmarks or Google Docs, you now have a way of searching your content via the OS X built-in Spotlight tool.
Written by Stuart Morgan and available for free (open source, in fact!), this simple application makes a local copy of your files on your machine that are [...]

Tagging Practices

Written on February 09, 2006 by Nick Santilli and 5 people have commented

My man Raz asked some questions about how to tag your files for use with Spotlight. I don’t believe there’s truly a right or wrong way to do it. (Except for the way I do it. That way being the right one of course…) Here are some ideas that hopefully will [...]