Oh well, one has to admit that digging into a subject reveals intricacies that might not have been apparent on the surface. There’s more to Spotlight. It can be accessed from the terminal by typing mdfind and reveals further parameters seen in the picture below.

Immediately, if i were to find all presentations on my volumes, here is what I would type:

Noticed that I sent all the results to a text file. invisible:1 would find all the hidden files on my volumes.

I would point your attention to real power here: kMDItem. These are the categories of metadata that a software publisher can set for its files or applications. You can get a full (gigantic listing) by typing:

Here are two examples of searches I conducted to find all my audio files:

To find all pictures with a width of 1024:

(notice that for numbers, you drop the * for strings).

It’s interesting, isn’t it? Here are for instance the fields that can be searched for Adobe’s PDF files:

Enjoy the power searches of a complex data world.

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Time to revisit Apple’s great search engine— Spotlight. The interface is bare naked and a bit annoying at first because it sets itself in motion immediately after you start typing for a keyword. There are alternatives that I’ll introduce at the end of this blog entry.

One of my favourite search tip is that you can use kind:[description], replace description and the square brackets by document, PDF, jpeg, png, tif, excel, email, movie, image (also yields disk images), presentations, music, folder and others like conversation to find a saved iChat discussion. This trick helps narrow results by file types. cmd+ENTER or cmd+click on the result will reveal its location in the Finder. In the Finder window, cmd+Y will slide preview an image file, cmd+option+Y will preview selected images full screen. For an exact match, place an expression in between double quotes just like in Google. There is also a calculator in Spotlight. Couldn’t find a kitchen sink though…

Once you click on a search result, you can save the search by hitting the save button at the upper right hand side of the window. It will be saved in a Finder window as an intelligent search folder. You can use Boolean operators (AND, NOT, OR).

If this is not enough and you would like to have a richer search interface check out these freewares SpotInside 1.0 and EasyFind. They provide much deeper search options (contents, folders, Google, preview of content, etc.).

The information on every file (cmd-i) provides a field of metadata for Spotlight. You can use a specific expression, say “akey” for keynote.app to start an application just by using the keyboard and Spotlight (thanks Jonathan )

One last thing, if you use Mail, check out the menu in the From: field, it has a built-in call to Spotlight allowing you to find all emails from that sender easily.

I was stuck in traffic, could not move and was getting all the fumes from other cars thinking we will be the last generation to live this type of aggravation. Electric cars are coming and fumes will go away, not traffic jams.

Microsoft PowerPoint 2008 is outstanding. It is full of features, easier to use and simply close to being the perfect business presentation environment. I started a knol on business presentations. I want to take this to the extreme, so expect a pretty long article.

PowerPoint 2008 for Mac is very powerful. The transitions are now easier to choose because they are better presented with icons. The interface is so rich in features that initially the user is overwhelmed by its intricacies.

The slide masters can be modified to infinity. Hey guys, you’ve gone overboard. Just kidding, there is never enough features in any software, just people not aware of them. Contextual tooling is amazing. That’s when tools appear only when you select a certain type of object. For example, you select an image and the cropping tool appears. I guess the idea was to unclutter the style box. It’s pretty neat.

One major drawback, I was not successful in converting back from the pptx format to 97-2005 ppt format. That’s when I ran into www.zamzar.com and luckily it worked. Check it out and use it to convert files without starting the application. On the road again.