UserGuide - spotlook - Google Code

The Date Type popup menu sets the date SpotLook considers when searching and displaying the results. You can choose creation date, modification date or last use date.

The Date Pickers represent the begin and end dates of the timelines. The queries are made inbetween these dates.

The Date Slider lets you set the begin date without using the begin date picker. In fact, it sets the number of days of the interval before the end date. The number of years represented by the whole slider is defined in the user defaults (the preferences).

The Search Field is where you enter your seach. You don't have to type in a hurry, it won't start the search before you pressed enter :-) For now, you cannot use boolean operators nor search for several keywords. The whole search key is handled as continuous string. The search is case insensitive.

The Time Ruler

The time ruler is the this gray strip under the toolbar, just above the tracks timelines.

It shows you the timescale whithout having to read the date pickers.

When you move the date slider, the time ruler updates with a nice effect.

You can zoom into a subperiod of time click and drag a selection zone ine the time ruler while holding the alt key. You can then get back to the default one month time interval in the menu View > Reset Dates.

The Tracks List

It shows two lists: the Track groups (sets of tracks) and the Tracks (all available tracks).

You can add or remove tracks or track groups from your selection by holding the alt key.

The selected tracks are displayed as timelines on the right.

To add a track, press cmd-N. By default, new tracks search for PDF files, but after adding a track, you want to edit the new track settings in the the track inspector.

To add a track group, select the tracks you want in that group and then press cmd-shift-N.

To delete tracks or track groups, you can just press the delete key.

If you accidentaly delete tracks, you can still undo you mistake by pressing cmd-Z.

Tracks Informations

Display tracks informations in the Tracks menu (cmd-I) or with the Information button in the toolbar.

In this mode, the tracks show their properties and let you edit them (name, uti, what attribute to search in).

If you wonder what UTIs do Spotlight importers use on your system, read the next chapter.

Since version 1.3, you can also define your own search, in the same format you would use with mdfind.

For example, here is how to find all the videos encoded with the H.264 codec:

You could also define a track that finds every file downloaded form google server: kMDItemWhereFroms == "google".

Next to the "Custom search" field is a small red triangle or green circle. After you hit the enter key, it tells you if your custom search is well formed or not. See the Spotlight query syntax documentation.

The UTI Discoverer

At the bottom of the Tracks menu is the UTI Discoverer. This window was added in SpotLook 1.2 to let you find easily the UTIs considered by the Spotlight importers on your system.

It is useful because say your using a document based software called Foo. It generates .foo files that are indexed by Spotlight, but you wonder how to add a Foo track in SpotLook.

In this case, go in the UTI Discoverer, type 'foo' and all UTIs containing 'foo' in their name or description will be filtered. You may then copy the relevant UTI in a new SpotLook track UTI definition.

The UTI search will be launched again each time you open the UTI Discoverer window.

The Tracks Timelines

This is the most interresting part.

It displays the tracks that are selected in the tracks list.

The upper left white crossed circle closes the track. Note that it just hides the track. The track is neigher deleted nor removed from its track groups.

When you click on the track icon, you toggle to the Tracks Informations mode.

The "Show all" check box makes the track ignore the search key. As a consequence, the track displays all Spotlight indexed files matching its properties (uti, scopes and so on).

Results are shown as blue squares. You can select them by clicking on them or drawing a "rubber band" around them. You can use the usual selection modifier keys like such as shift to include/exclude items. You can select all the items on a track with cmd-A. You can unselect all items on a track with the esc key. You can select results on several tracks in the same time.

A track can get too many results and be unable to display them. It can happen for instance if I try to display all my emails since 1998. SpotLook is obviously not intended to run such queries. Happily, since version 1.2, you can set a fetch limit in order not to be overwhelmed by results. Beware, this limit is not a ceil but a floot; I mean a limit set to 600 (the default) will stop the query when the tracks gets more than 600 results.

I added a menu item File > Export Image... to dump the scroll view. It was primarily intended to ease screenshots generation for documentation (see common use cases below) but it may be useful to someone else.

You might notice that, sometimes, some squares appear "higher" (more towards the top) than others. I did intend use the vertical axe for the results relevance, but because of a NSMetadataQuery bug, or because of my inability to use it properly, the results get bad relevance values. Here is a post explaining the problem. If anybody can help...