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How did anyone ever find anything before Spotlight? By relying one of these two techniques:
In Tiger, -F still opens up a Search dialog box, and there's still a Search bar at the top of every folder window. Both of these, though, are still more entry points for Spotlight. The File Find command (-F) opens the Search window shown in Figure 3-7. It's a lot more powerful (and complex) than the basic Spotlight menu, because it can hunt down icons using extremely specific criteria. If you spent enough time setting up the search, you could use this feature to find a document whose name begins with the letters Cro , is over one megabyte in size , was created after 6/1/05 but before the end of the year, was changed within the last week, has the file name suffix .doc , and contains the phrase "attitude adjustment." (Of course, if you knew that much about a file, you'd probably know where it is without having to use the Search window. But you get the picture.)
To use the Search window, you need to feed it two pieces of information: where you want it to search, and what to look for. You can make both of these criteria as simple or complex as you like. Tip: If you open a folder window before pressing -F, the Search dialog box appears with that folder's namefor example, "Folder 'Music'"already selected. In other words, Tiger realizes that you want to confine your search to the window that's open before you. 3.4.1. Where to LookThe words at the top of the windowServers, Computer, Home, and Othersare buttons . The Search box starts out proposing to search the open window, but you can click any one of these to tell Spotlight where to search:
Once you've added a new search location to the list, it sprouts its own button at the top of the window so it's available the next time you want to search. (If you drag in a group of folders, the button says, for example, "3 folders.") Tip: If the object of your quest doesn't show up, you can adjust the scope of the search with one quick click on another button at the top of the window, like Home or Computer. Spotlight shows you the updated list of matches without making you retype the search request. 3.4.2. What to Look ForIf all you want to do is search your entire computer for files containing certain text, you may as well use the Spotlight menu described at the beginning of this chapter. The power of the Search window , though, is that it lets you design much more specific searches, using over 125 different search criteria: date modified, file size, the "last opened" date, color label, copyright holder's name, shutter speed (of a digital photo), tempo (of a music file), and so on. Figure 3-9 illustrates how detailed this kind of search can be.
To add a criterion to the list, click one of the + buttons at the right end of the dialog box. A new row appears in the window, whose pop-up menus you can use to specify what date, what file size, and so on. Figure 3-9 shows how you might build, for example, a search for all photo files that you've opened within the last week that contain a Photoshop layer named Freckle Removal . To delete a row from the Find window, click thebutton at its right end. Here's a rundown of the ways you can restrict your search, according to the options you find in the first pop-up menu of a row. Note that after you choose from that first pop-up menu (Last Opened, for example), you're supposed to use the second pop-up menu to narrow the choice (Within the Last 2 Weeks, for example), as you'll read below. Note: It may surprise you that choosing something from the Kind pop-up menu triggers the search instantly . (In previous versions of Mac OS X, the search didn't begin until you clicked Search.) As soon as you choose Applications, for example, the window fills with a list of every program on your hard drive. Want a quick list of every folder on your entire machine? Choose Folders.(You can interrupt the search by clicking the little X in the lower-right corner of the window.)Of course, if you type something into the Search box at the top of the windowbefore or after you've used one of these pop-up menusthe list pares itself down to items that match what you've typed. 3.4.2.1. KindWhen the first pop-up menu says Kind, you can use the second pop-up menu to indicate what kind of file you're looking for: Images, Text files, PDF files, Movies, Music, Documents, Presentations, Folders, or Applications. For example, when you're trying to free up some space on your drive, you could round up all your gigantic movie files. (As noted above, choosing one of these file types makes the window begin to fill with matches automatically and instantly.) And what if the item you're looking for isn't among the nine canned choices in the second pop-up menu? What if it's an alias, or a Photoshop plug-in, or some other type? That's what the Others option is all about. It's the rabbit hole into a staggering array of file typeshundreds, ranging alphabetically from ".Net document" to "ZIP archive"that Spotlight knows about. To specify which of these oddball file types you want to round up, you can either choose from the Others pop-up menu shown in Figure 3-10, or you can type part of a file type's name into the text box. Mac OS X fills in the closest match automatically.
3.4.2.2. Last Opened/Last Modified/CreatedWhen you choose one of these options from the first pop-up menu, the second pop-up menu lets you isolate files, programs, and folders according to the last time you opened them, the last time you changed them, or when they were created.
These are awesomely useful controls, because they let you specify a chronological window for whatever you're looking for. Tip: You're allowed to add two Date rowsa great trick that lets you round up files that you created or edited between two dates. Set up the first Date row to say "is after," and the second one to say "is before."In fact, if it doesn't hurt your brain to think about it, how about this? You can even have more than two Date rows. Use one pair to specify a range of dates for the file's creation date, for example, and two other rows to limit when it was modified.Science! 3.4.2.3. KeywordsKeywords are invisible Web-page text labels used so people can search for them. If you're in the practice of saving Web pages onto your hard drive, you can use the keyword search feature much the way online search pages like Yahoo do: to call up a Web page according to what it's about , rather than what words actually appear on it. Tip: What Keyword searches find most of the time is saved Web pages (including Safari archives and HTML documents). But remember that Mac OS X's own online help system is built out of thousands of HTML (Web-type) pages tooso a Keyword search is a great way to search the online help without actually opening the Help program. 3.4.2.4. Color LabelMac OS X lets you not only tag certain icons with text-and-color labels, but alsoperhaps even more importantlets you round them up later, for backing up, deleting, or burning to a CD en masse, for example. Section 2.6 describes how to flag icons with labels. Now comes the payoff: finding all the icons with a specific label, wherever they may be hiding. The criterion row sprouts seven colored dotsrepresenting the seven available color labelsplus an X, which means "find all icons with no label applied." 3.4.2.5. NameThe beauty of Spotlight is that it finds text anywhere in your files, no matter what their names are. That's why Apple demoted this optionthe icon's nameto such a low position in the pop-up menu. Anyway, when you want to search for an icon by the text that's only in its name , this is your ticket. Capitalization doesn't matter. Of course, if all you want to do is find files whose names include Sales , you may as well save yourself all of this reading and use the Spotlight menu. But using the Search window offers you far more control, thanks to the second pop-up menu that offers you these options:
Tip: If you listen closely, you can hear the cheers of propeller-heads worldwide over this development: Mac OS x 10.4 lets you perform "and" searches. That is, you can add Name rows to your Find setup more than once , for even more specific searches.For example, if you create one Name row to look for apple , a second Name row to seek out corp , and a third Name row to hunt down memo , you round up only files whose names include all three of those terms ("Apple Corporate Memo.doc," "Memo to Apple Corps of Dallas"). 3.4.2.6. ContentsYou can think of this option as the opposite of Name. It finds only the text that's inside your files, and completely ignores their icon names. That's a handy function when, for example, a document's name doesn't match its contents. Maybe a marauding toddler pressed the keys while playing KidPix, inadvertently renaming your doctoral thesis "xggrjpO#$5%////." Or maybe you just can't remember what you called something. 3.4.2.7. SizeUsing this control, and its "Greater than"/"Less than" pop-up menu, you can restrict your search to files of a certain size. Use the second pop-up menu to choose KB (kilobytes), MB (megabytes), or GB (gigabytes). 3.4.2.8. OtherIf this were a math equation, it might look like this: options X options=overwhelming . Choosing Other from the first pop-up menu opens a special dialog box containing at least 115 other criteria. Not just the big kahunas like Name, Size, and Kind, but far more targeted (and obscure) criteria like "Bits per sample" (so you can round up MP3 music files of a certain quality), "Device make" (so you can round up all digital photos taken with, say, a Canon camera), "Key signature" (so you can find all the GarageBand songs you wrote in the key of F sharp), "Pages" (so you can find all Word documents that are really long), and so on. As you can see in Figure 3-11, each one comes with a short description. Note: As of Mac OS X 10.4.1, the Visibility option is broken. It doesn't find invisible icons.
You may think that Spotlight is offering you a staggering array of file-type criteria. In fact, though, big bunches of information categories (technically called metadata ) are all hooks for a relatively small number of document types. For example:
Now, you could argue that in the time it takes you to set up a search for such a specific kind of data, you could have just rooted through your files and found what you wanted manually. But heyyou never know. Someday, you may remember nothing about a photo you're looking for except that you used the flash and an F-stop of 1.8. 3.4.3. What to Do with Search ResultsYou can manipulate the list of search results much the way you'd approach a list of files in a standard Finder list view window. You can move up or down the list by pressing the arrow keys, scroll a "page" at a time with the Page Up and Page Down keys, and so on. You can also highlight multiple icons simultaneously , the same way you would in a Finder list view: Highlight all of them by choosing Edit Select All; highlight individual items by -clicking them; drag diagonally to enclose a cluster of found items; and so on. Or you can proceed in any of these ways: 3.4.3.1. Find out where something isIf you click once on any item in the results list, the bottom edge of the window becomes a folder map that shows you where that item is. For example, in Figure 3-12, the notation in the Path strip means: "The About AppleScript Studio.pdf icon you found is in the Developer Tools folder, which is in the Installers folder, which is in the Applications folder, which is on the hard drive called Macintosh HD." To get your hands on the actual icon, choose File Open Enclosing Folder (-R). Mac OS X highlights the icon in question, sitting there in its window wherever it happens to be on your hard drive. 3.4.3.2. Open the file (or open one of the folders it's in)If one of the found files is the one you were looking for, double-click it to open it (or highlight it and press either -O or -down arrow). In many cases, you'll never even know or care where the file wasyou just want to get into it. You can also double-click to open any of the folders that appear in the folder map in the bottom half of the window. For example, in Figure 3-12, you could double-click the selected PDF icon to open it, or the Developer Tools folder to open it , and so on. 3.4.3.3. Move or delete the fileYou can drag an item directly out of the found-files list and into a different folder, window, or diskor straight to the Dock or the Trash. If you click something else and then re-click that item in the results list, the folder map at the bottom of the window updates itself to reflect the file's new location.
3.4.3.4. Rename the fileYou can even rename a highlighted file in the Search Results window, just as though it's sitting in a Finder list view window. Click its name once, wait for the renaming rectangle to appear, and then type over the old name. (Be careful, though: if you rename an icon so that it no longer matches your original search criteria, it instantly disappears from the list!) 3.4.3.5. File-menu commandsAfter highlighting an icon (or icons) in the list of found files, you can use the commands in the File menu, including Get Info, Add to Sidebar, and Move to Trash. 3.4.3.6. Collapse the listBy clicking the flippy triangles , you can collapse or expand the category headings, just as in the regular Spotlight window. Once again, you can also Option-click a flippy triangle to expand or collapse all of them at once. Note: This results window offers several other controls that should look familiar if you've experienced the thrill of the Spotlight window. For example, the blue heading for Images offers a slideshow button, a list-view button, and a thumbnails-view button. And every list-view item offers an button at the far right of its row, for quick detailed information. 3.4.3.7. Copy a fileTo copy a file, Option-drag it out of the Search Results window and onto the desktop, into a different window, or onto a disk or folder icon. Alternatively, highlight the file and then choose Edit Copy "Bunion Treatments.doc (or whatever the file's name is). Then click inside a different folder window, or click a folder itself, before choosing Edit Paste. 3.4.3.8. Make an aliasYou can make an alias for one of the found items exactly the way you would in a Finder window: Drag it out of the window while pressing -Option. The alias appears wherever you release the mouse (on the desktop, for example). 3.4.3.9. Start overIf you'd like to repeat the search using a different search phrase, just edit the text in the Search bar (press Option- -T to get there). The results pane updates itself as you type. 3.4.3.10. Give upIf none of these avenues suits your fancy, you can close the Search window as you would any other ( -W). |
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