David Pogue at Macworld 2008: Big, juicy Spotlight remake in Leopard

By David Pogue

David Pogue at Macworld Leopard secrets revealed Leopard's new help program Big, juicy Spotlight remake in Leopard Using Leopard's Spaces Icon view available in open and save boxes Getting started with Leopard's Time Machine Featured Books

TRANSCRIPT

So Spotlight has been with us for a long time. This has gotten the biggest, juiciest remake of Leopard and gets a whole chapter in Mac OSX, The Missing Manual for those of you who just wandered up. One of the best, best, best things ever is a very subtle change that I’m thrilled that they made because it’s the kind of thing no one’s gonna notice or write about in PC World or whatever. Basically in the old days when you type a few letters of a word, Spotlight would take a minute to find everything on your computer with that word in the name or inside the file, be it document, program, font, address book, entry calendar, entry song lyrics, whatever, all at the same time. What’s great about this feature is that you can launch programs very quickly without messing with the doc or the applications folder. You could go command space to open Safari. That also closes it. I do this for hours; that’s why my books are always late. Then you type “Safari” and there it is.

So the problem is, look. It takes a while for this menu to build. It’s still going. It can take ten seconds. That’s an eternity when you have a 900-page book to get out. So what they did in Leopard is they performed two searches sequentially. The first one looks only for applications, only for programs. Not until that part of the list is done does it begin looking for everything else. So what that means is if you search for the name of a program its name appears there instantly, and I mean instantly. There’s no ten seconds; there’s one one-second. It’s right now.

Someone name a Macintosh program. What? I don’t have Quicken or Illustrator. Automator. Okay, here we go. “Auto.” There it is, top of the menu, long before the rest of the menu is built. Name another program. So here’s how I not only find but open preview in under one second without taking my hands off the keyboard, in fact without even looking. Command space PREV enter and I’ve just opened preview. There’s nothing open but it’s there, and the reason I can do that is because of another small change. It’s no longer command enter to open the top hit, the most likely possibility. It’s just enter. So now you can go command space, first few letters of the program, enter, and you are actually in that program without breaking your stride so it’s really phenomenal.

Not only that but Spotlight has been goosed up in a number of other ways. You can now do math equations right there. 10x24, there’s the equation and the answer right in – who knew? Spent $100 on this thing and you didn’t even know it was there. If you hit “enter” you actually open the calculator, although I don’t quite get it because you already have the answer and when the calculator ultimately opens it does not in fact show you that equation. I guess it’s got to do something.

So this is actually quite in-depth. It actually has things like square root, so if I do sqrt(81), lo and behold that’s 9. The square root of 81 is 9 evidently, and then you can even do things like pi, 3xpi turns out to be that. You can do powers, like 6 to the power of 6 would be like this, 6,6 and there it is, 46656. So it’s now a full blown mathematical calculator and if you Google this or if you have $21 get the book, you’ll find that there are many other – oh here’s the calculator. Finally he’s showing up. There are many other variations of high-end math equations you can type in there. It also a dictionary. Someone give me a difficult word. Your brain is worn out I know. Mizzle? Is it a word? I thought it was like “For shizzle.” No, it is a noun and it means light rain or drizzle! Leopard, ladies and gentlemen.

So right there before the fight over Scrabble has even gotten under way you’ve got the answer right there, and it gets that from of course the dictionary and you can hit “enter” and jump directly to that word. That’s a great word. I did not know that. What I bet you did not know was that I, David Pogue, was the 1976 Ohio spelling bee champion! It’s true. I actually went to the nationals and I was the first one out. It’s absolutely true. Everyone else went to see that Spellbound, the documentary of the overworked Indian and Asian kids whose parents make them win this national spelling bee, and everyone’s like “Oh that’s really interesting” and I was in the corner going [crying]. What a strange reaction to this documentary.

So anyway, my winning Ohio word was “syzygy” and it turns out it’s an alignment of the planets, great word for more reason than one. While we’re talking about the dictionary it’s got some cool stuff in it that you probably did not know it had. It has a thesaurus. Not too many synonyms for syzygy. Mizzle though, nope. So it also has a dictionary of Apple terminology. Why does everyone keep talking about QuickTime? What the hell is QuickTime? Turns out QuickTime is multimedia software from Apple. Oh, I didn’t know that. So you can now look up things and you can look up things directly on Wikipedia right from the dictionary, and what’s the fastest way to open the dictionary? Right, command space DITC enter. Exactly. No one said that. I’m giving you the credit.

So another really cool thing in the dictionary that hardly anyone even notices is the front and the back matter. In a book the front matter is the table of contents, the dedication, the copyright notices, all the stuff before the actual words begin, and the back matter are the appendixes and the index and all that junk. So you now have the complete front and back matter of the Oxford English Dictionary and there’s some amazing stuff in there. They’ve got the Constitution, the history of English, the list of presidents there have ever been, the Declaration of Independence, countries of the world, the chemical elements, weights and measures, all the alphabets of the world, clichés. I think this is what all those computer magazines use as their reference when they write articles.

This software goes above and beyond the call of duty, although this icon is an accident waiting to happen. Did you ever notice that? Computer magazines, man. They never say fast, they only say liaising fast. What really drives me crazy about computer magazines, at the end of the review they don’t say buy it or don’t buy it. Am I right? They say “Choose the program that suits your needs.” Why the hell did I buy a computer magazine if I could make that decision on my own?

Anyway, so speaking of Spotlight by the way, one bad thing. They took away the number of total hits, so Spotlight only shows you the top 20 items that it’s found. All the rest it doesn’t show you in menu, and it used to say how many more you’re missing. It doesn’t say that anymore. It just says “Show all.” If you click that it takes you to something that you could’ve gotten more directly anyway, which is the new Finder search command. What I would do if I were you is use command F for find. It opens that window directly, and what’s really great is it lets you search by file name just like Mac OS9 and 8, 7 and 6 used to work.

Why is that great? Because it’s very useful to search for words inside files, yes it is, but it also means you’re gonna get many more results than if you just know the name of the thing and you can search by name. So if you just search by name you get many fewer things and you jump directly to them. You can also set up multiple criteria here. Find me only the applications with the word “Apple” in them that I’ve opened within the last 60 days that have a file label of that one, which has a musical tempo of 60 beats per minute. By the way, that’s just my pop-up menu of criteria. If you go in here and choose “other” there are 125 more of them. The name of the album the song came from, whether the Photo Shop file is an alpha channel, the altitude of something. I don’t even know what would have that. Yeah, how high you were when you wrote it.

The codec use in code of this movie, the composer of a song in your iTunes collection, 125 of these things. The checkboxes that you turn on are the ones you’ll have quicker access to later, although I would submit to you that if you need this many criteria to find something it’d be faster to just open your folders until you find it. In any case incredibly specific searches and new in Leopard, Boolean searches. This is the and, or and not searches, so for the first time you can search for something that is either a post-script file or a PDF file all in one list. You don’t have to do two separate searches. So you can say “Find me everything that is PDF or EPS” and I’m gonna see a complete list of all my EPS or whatever, and Spotlight has always had this thing where you can say “Kind: PDF” and you’re gonna see only your PDF documents, or “Kind: App” and you’ll see only the programs on your hard drive, right?

So now you can do things like “Kind: App” or “Kind: Image.” So here’s a complete list of my pictures and my programs. Yeah, that’s a useful one, and you can say “Find me all the ones where the author is Cayce or the author is David” or whatever and it’ll show you all the documents created by one of us, and there’s “and” and there’s “not.” “Show me everything with the word ‘dolphins’ but I don’t wanna hear about the Miami Dolphins. I’m looking for the fish.” So you have to use capital letters for and, or and not, and by the way the last thing they’ve added is quote marks so you can now finally do “Miami Dolphins” just like in Google, and it will find you only the references of things that have those two words next to each other. If you don’t use quotes it’ll find documents that have the word “Miami” up here and “Dolphins” down there.