4 ms·
IMO Spotlight is the best example of minimalist software design. In a single universal field you have instant: app launcher, calculator, dictionary, file searc
by kaylarose 16y ago
IMO Spotlight is the best example of minimalist software design.
In a single universal field you have instant: app launcher, calculator, dictionary, file search, email search, contact search.
My single best tip for Mac power-users: learn what you can do with Spotlight.
Edit: grammar
- emehrkay 16y agoForgot about the dictionary, I use it all the time in spotlight
- redacted 16y agoSpotlight also has keywords - kind:pdf date:yesterday author:short_name from:contact_name And the boolean relations AND, OR, NOT work as you might expect. There's a lot of cool stuff hidden in Spotlight. Try man mdfind to play around with command-line Spotlight.
- redacted 16y agoHere is a particularly good resource on this aspect of Spotlight: http://hints.macworld.com/dlfiles/spotlight_cmds.txt http://hints.macworld.com/dlfiles/spotlight_cmds.txt
- experimental 16y agoI know you didn't claim Apple invented it, but I thought it would be informative to say Apple have added their own ideas but the main idea comes from BeOS, a once commercially viable operating system. These days it lives on in an open source recreation that has improved on BeOS, called Haiku. It uses a 64-bit journaling file system which has been improved now called HaikuFS that can hold 80,000 petabytes, caches so is fast and has user-definable attributes, like for contacts, music or anything you can think of really which can help you find things fast. There's a reimplementation of Dashboard called Corkboard written by a fan so it goes both ways - good ideas are used elsewhere. :)