MacFormat

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Putting Spotlight under the spotlight

Between September 2005 and July 2011 I was a regular contributor to MacFormat in the UK.

Whereas I’m posting the published articles for my MacWarehouse writing with the MacFormat ones I’ve decided to post the text as submitted, including any comments that I included for design. I am, however, allowing myself a few small edits for clarity.

The particular one is my tenth column, written in June 2006. This is presented purely as a historical record as much, if not all, of the information contained in it may well have changed in the meantime.

Putting Spotlight under the spotlight

When Apple launched Mac OS 8.5 back in 1998 one of the headline features was a technology called Sherlock which was designed to search inside files for content rather than what it appears to be now, which is a collection of poorly supported and rarely used channels of web information which can be found elsewhere and done far better. At the time a number of developers released plug-ins to allow Sherlock to search inside their application’s files. Sherlock presented the user with a list of search results that were ranked in order of the likelihood that the result was the one that the user wanted. Sherlock was really well received and Apple even went so far as to enable web sites hosted on AppleShare IP to use Sherlock as a search engine.

Sound familiar?

Just like Sherlock; Spotlight is capable of searching inside files and returning a list of results ranked in order of importance. Just like Sherlock; developers have released a number of plug-ins to allow Spotlight to search within their files. Just like Sherlock; OS X Server can now use Spotlight as a search engine for a web site that is hosted on it.

So is Spotlight just a modern, OS X, version of what Sherlock was for Mac OS 8.5-9.2? Not at all, Spotlight can do all of the above and much more.

The key difference between Sherlock and Spotlight is that Spotlight searches metadata as well as the file’s content. Metadata is data about data. In other words Spotlight can also the characteristics of a file and not just what is in it. You can search for files of a certain type, e.g. presentations or movies, files that were changed within the last week, files that a specific person emailed to you and even photos that were taken with a specific model of camera. Spotlight can search the keywords that you tag your pictures in iPhoto with and you can add your own keywords to any file by adding your own Spotlight comments in the file’s Get Info window.

You can refine your search to types of files by typing kind: before you enter your search term. So to search for pictures of your cat Fred you would type kind:image Fred or if you had put together a Keynote presentation about Fred you could type kind:presentation Fred. If you knew that you had put that presentation together some time this year you could further refine your search by typing kind:presentation date:this year Fred. You can get a complete list f keywords and date ranges by searching Mac Help for spotlight keyword.

One thing that Sherlock could do that Spotlight can’t is to search the web for answers. These days people tend to use a search engine like Google for that but it is possible to search Google from within Spotlight. Google Importer from Caffinated Cocoa Software (who it seems are now defunct so I’ll remove the URL) is a Spotlight plug-in that allows you to search Google at the same time as searching you Mac.

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A Shortcut to Special Characters

Between September 2005 and July 2011 I was a regular contributor to MacFormat in the UK.

Whereas I’m posting the published articles for my MacWarehouse writing with the MacFormat ones I’ve decided to post the text as submitted, including any comments that I included for design. I am, however, allowing myself a few small edits for clarity.

The particular one is my ninth column, written in May 2006. This is presented purely as a historical record as much, if not all, of the information contained in it may well have changed in the meantime.

A Shortcut to Special Characters

Tucked away at the bottom of the Edit menu is an option called “Special Characters…”. Selecting this brings up a character palette which allows you pick and choose a number of graphical characters without struggling to remember exactly which key combination you need to enter to be able to type them. This is a bit like the old OS 9 Keyboard desk accessory except the organization is much better. Instead of simply seeing a picture of the keyboard and having to try a number of different modifier keys to find out what characters they give the Character Palette is organized into groups such as Currency Symbols, Digits and even Braille Patterns.

You can add characters into a list of frequently used ones which you can access via the Favorites tab and at the bottom of the window are two disclosure triangles that allow you to see related characters and how the character looks in the various fonts that contain it. Not every font contains every character so if you are planning on sending a document that contains one of the special characters to someone else be sure that they have the same font installed as otherwise they may not see the character at all or even get an entirely different character. There is even a search box at the bottom that will allow you to search for characters by name.

If you look at the Edit menu in Text Edit you will see that there is a keyboard shortcut for “Special Characters…”, Apple-Alt-T, however if you open up Mail and have a look at the Edit menu there isn’t one. It would be really useful if we could have a keyboard shortcut that brought up the Character Palette in any program that supports it and not just those that already have one. We can do this by going to the Keyboard Shortcuts tab of the Keyboard & Mouse preference pane in System Preferences.

Underneath the list of current keyboard shortcuts click on the + sign and create a shortcut for All Applications. In the Menu Title box you will need to type “Special Characters…” without the quotes. One thing to watch out for is that the three dots are not separate characters, they are a single character called an ellipsis so you will need to type Alt­; or simply insert it from the Punctuation section of the Character Palette.

Finally you need to assign a combination of keys that will activate your shortcut. Your first instinct will be to use AppleAltT since this is what is already used by some applications. However, if you look through the menus of Mail you will see that this combination is already defined for “Move Again” in the Message menu, it would be good if Apple’s various development teams all agreed on the same shortcuts. Therefore I suggest that you use Shift-Apple-Alt-T instead. This will override the Apple-Alt-T that is already defined in other applications so you will have a shortcut that you can use everywhere.

Quit any applications that are already running as the new keyboard shortcut will only be recognised by applications that are launched after it has been defined.

You will now be able to easily call up the Character Palette from any application that supports it by typing Shift-Apple-Alt-T.