Spotlight continues to evolve, both on the Mac and in iOS.
Try your hand at searching for current information about the weather or your favorite sports team. For example, on my Mac, if I type:
What is the weather
I get a nice chart showing local weather both hourly and daily. In iOS 9 Spotlight, if I type:
weat
(just need the first four letters), I’ll get a short summary of the local weather right now. Tap that cell, and it brings up the Weather app which looks very much like the El Capitan Spotlight results.
On the sports side, in El Capitan Spotlight, if I type:
natio
(first five letters of Nationals, my local baseball team), I get the box score from last night. As I type, spotlight offers to fill in the rest of my query, so when I get what I want, I can just stop typing.
On the iOS 9 side, the results are similar, but not identical. Clearly, they use different natural language parsing engines. And both the iOS 9 and El Cap Spotlight parsing engines seem different than that used by Siri.
Spotlight on the Mac has long been able to function as a calculator. But now that calculator functionality is available in iOS 9. Want to give it a try? Bring up spotlight (on the Mac hit command-space, in iOS 9, pull down from the home screen or swipe right from the first home screen), then type an equation or a conversion:
10 pounds
Or
10 pounds in ounces
The results on the Mac are more comprehensive, but good to know the iOS 9 version can do this. Since iOS 9 Spotlight does not use the numeric keyboard, the calculator is a bit of a pain, but the conversion element works well. And you can tap the result to bring up a Google page to take this further.
Something that’s evolved over the years on the Mac is the Spotlight window itself. Now, in El Capitan, you can click in the Spotlight window to drag it around and, of course, click/drag on the bottom or top edge to make the window shorter or taller.
Once you resize/move the Spotlight window, it’ll keep that form. Want to recenter the window? Click and hold on the spotlight magnifying glass icon in the menu bar. An odd little Easter egg, that.
There is much more to Spotlight than these few examples. And not sure how much of this is brand new, either. But I’ve been playing around, got a bit curious, so now you have to suffer.
Have any other Spotlight tips or tricks? Tweet ’em to me (@davemark) or add them in the comments.
The one thing that Spotlight (any version including El Cap) doesn’t do that Alfred still does better is remember and learn from one’s searches.
If I have a file called “United Visa Card” that I hit all the time, Spotlight will still not push it up to the top of the list while Alfred will do it in two tries. Once its on the top of the list I can simply hit return to open it with Alfred. Very useful for all kinds of things.
I’d much rather use core apps and core system capabilities but this has become so important to me that I stick with Alfred which has done this from it’s beginning.
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Two issues with Spolight — maybe somebody has answers. First, the left column list of search result file names is so narrow that it is very hard to distinguish different files from just viewing the list; especially if you have different versions of a file saved and the difference in the file name is beyond the number of characters that Spotlight shows you.
Second, I’d like to be able to see the location where a file is saved when it is highlighted in the left column search results list.