Spotlight

A new feature of Mac OS X Tiger, Spotlight is a search mechanism capable of finding just about anything anywhere on your Mac miniand doing the job quickly. Clicking the blue magnifying glass icon opens a box where you can type your search terms. As Spotlight finds items, the results box opens (Figure 8.11).

Figure 8.11. Spotlight searches your hard disk and displays results from documents, PDF files, e-mail, contacts, folders, events and to-do lists, imagesessentially, any file on your system. It can even find the names of artists and other information inside music and photo files. Here, the results box shows the items that a search on the word fish yielded.

The Spotlight System Preferences pane (Figure 8.12) allows you to choose the range of items searched.

Figure 8.12. The Spotlight preferences pane allows you to select the types of items a Spotlight search finds.

Spotlight is a great new feature and one you will use often. You can also access it from Mail and other applications where you see the magnifying glass icon and a search field. In these cases, the search is limited to the application in use. One exception: The search field in the Safari browser initiates a Google search.

Apple is very proud of Spotlight, comparing it to features Microsoft has announced for versions of its operating systems not due for release until 2007 and beyond.

Mac OS X Tiger also lets you create Smart Folders (Figure 8.13). These folders contain the results of Spotlight searches and are constantly updated as you create new files or information changes. Smart Folders are an extension of the Smart Playlist concept first introduced in iTunes. Smart Folders are available from the Finder (on the File menu, choose Smart Folder) as well as in Mail and Address Book.

Figure 8.13. Each Smart Folder holds the results of a constantly updated Spotlight search of your files.

Here's an example: I want to create a Smart Folder to keep track of items related to Judy Ziajka, who copyedited this book. We traded a tremendous amount of e-mail and files. Using her last name as the search term for the folder (using the Contents search option), the Smart Folder finds every file that includes her last name. Every time I open the folder, the contents are automatically updated.

I also have a Smart Folder for mail we've exchanged. However, opening Spotlight (the blue magnifying glass icon) provides more comprehensive search results than Smart Folder does.