OS X Spotlight. Old dog, new tricks. Thursday, August 14, 2008

Spotlight was a good idea when it came out, but once your computer gets full of stuff it gets much slower as one might expect.

I like that with Spotlight I don't have to put every app I ever use in the Dock. Instead I can search Spotlight for occasionally used apps and launch them that way. But, if you're in a rush and find Spotlight slow you can get Quicksilver – what most of my Mac-using friends have. As it's name implies, it sure is quick!

Upon recently upgrading to Leopard I discovered a couple new handy features of Spotlight. It seems to be the quickest way to do some simple arithmetic as well as look up the definition of a word. Try typing into Spotlight 5+5-2*1.2. It'll show the Calculator application that you can launch, but next to it is also the answer. Try typing in the word 'affable' and you'll see the Dictionary app and the truncated sentence showing the definition of the word.