Mac App Better Than Spotlight

Nov 22, 2019  Cerebro is an open source and free electron-based productivity software alternative to Alfred and Spotlight. It is focused on speed and good UI and UX. In most cases you.

Spotlight

Search with Spotlight

  1. Click in the upper-right corner of the menu bar, or press Command-Space bar.
  2. Enter what you want to find. You can search for something like “apple store” or “emails from emily”.
  3. To open an item from the results list, double-click the item. Or to quickly look through the results, use the Up Arrow and Down Arrow keys.

Search by file type or location

  • To search by file type, use the word “kind” and the file type. For example, type “kind:folders” or “kind:audio”.
  • To show the location of a file on your Mac, choose the file from the results list, then press and hold Command. The file’s location appears at the bottom of the preview. To open the file’s location, press Command-R.
  • To see all the results from your Mac in the Finder, scroll to the bottom of the results list, then double-click “Show all in Finder.”

Get definitions, calculations, and conversions

Spotlight can show you dictionary definitions, calculations, measurement conversions, and more. Find out more ways to search with Spotlight.

Here are examples of what you can do:

  • To get a definition, enter a word or phrase, then click the result in the Definition section.
  • To get a calculation, enter something like “2+2” in the search field.
  • To convert measurements, enter something like 25 lbs or “32 ft to meters”.

Find movie showtimes, weather, and nearby places

You can use Spotlight to search for movie showtimes, weather, and places near you. Mp4a to mp3 app mac.

Here are examples of what you can do:

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  • To get showtimes, enter the name of the movie that you want to see. To see what's playing near you, enter “showtimes.”
  • To get local weather information, enter “weather.”
  • To find restaurants near you, enter something like “places to eat,” then click a result in the Maps section.

Learn more

  • Rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac.
  • Use Search on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

Spotlight features might vary by country or region. Mac os x wireframe software.

With the releases of OS X Yosemite and OS X El Capitan, Apple improved a feature that remained largely untouched and unimproved before that: Spotlight search. Before these releases, people often looked to third-party search apps that would improve digging through the Mac for files, apps and information.

What Is App Spotlight Samsung

One such example was Alfred. Years ago, it was considered a staple among power users. But now, Spotlight has gotten smarter. It can find Wikipedia articles and YouTube videos on the web, retrieve weather reports and stock information and understand natural language. Is Alfred, the once king of search for Mac users, still necessary, or can Spotlight find pretty much everything you’d need at this point?

Alfred is Extremely Customizable

Alfred’s main perk over Spotlight is still its extensive customization options. If you head into the app’s preferences by clicking the tiny gear in the Alfred search bar and click Features, you’ll see a comprehensive list of everything Alfred can do.

This includes what you might expect like searching through your Mac’s files and folders, contacts, bookmarks, images and applications. But it also includes some unexpected treats like web searches through Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, IMDB, YouTube and more. Plus, each result gets assigned a keyboard shortcut.

You can even add your own, which Spotlight won’t do. Do this by clicking Web Searches in the sidebar and then Add Custom Search. Enter the search URL, then give your new search a title and keyword shortcut to perform your search in the future.

Note: This requires that you know the URL for searches performed on specific websites. For instance, Google’s is http://www.google.com/search?q={query} and Twitter’s is http://www.twitter.com/search?q={query}. Check out AppStorm’s article for a few good examples to get started.

Alfred can act as a quick calculator, dictionary and assistant for various system tasks like emptying the trash or logging out, too. It even includes a very unique Remote feature in which, paired with the iOS app, lets you control Alfred and different tasks on your Mac from your iPhone.

In addition to all of that, Alfred has the potential to get immensely more powerful …if you’re willing to pay up. A number of fantastic features in Alfred 2.0 include being able to search through clipboard history, control iTunes playback, search through passwords with 1Password integration and set up automatic workflows to perform repetitive tasks that include other apps. Unfortunately, it costs to unlock the rest of these: £17 or $26.10. That’s a pretty big price to pay compared to Spotlight, which is built into the Mac in its entirety for free.

Spotlight Pulls in More Content

Mac App Better Than Spotlight

While Alfred has an advantage in the customization department (albeit rivaled by Spotlight’s Flashlight plugin), Spotlight does a better job of bringing content to you rather than having to hunt for it. If you search “weather,” Apple’s Spotlight will show you current conditions and the forecast within your search. You don’t need to hit Enter or even type in your location. It just knows, and it’s way more convenient than having to open up a website in Alfred.

Free Spotlight App

Mac App Better Than Spotlight

Searching for Adele’s new album will bring up news articles about it, the music video for a single on YouTube and a Wikipedia article that you can even begin reading in Spotlight search. Again, Alfred just provides links to open these websites and doesn’t intelligently match results to the context of your search.

Being an Apple product itself, Spotlight has the advantage of being able to search through other Apple services. Enter a business address to get directions in Maps and even get quick information like a phone number and reviews, or search for a movie for showtimes or purchase links in iTunes.

This is extremely important because this makes Spotlight much quicker to use than Alfred. Granted, Alfred can control iTunes playback and create workflows, but at a cost.

Spotlight is customizable too, but not to the extent of Alfred. The only changes you can make are in System Preferences and just allow you to check or uncheck which categories show up in results and which folders you want Spotlight to skip over during searches.

Spotlight Shines

Altogether, Spotlight is just a more polished search engine. It’s the instant access and quick answers that make it more powerful than Alfred, especially since features are all included for free. Without paying anything, Alfred is capable of less and doesn’t pull answers directly into the search results.

If you opt for Alfred’s paid Powerpack upgrade, you do get some excellent power features, but at that point the winner is subjective and determined on a case-by-case basis of every user’s needs. People who don’t need workflows or 1Password integration won’t find much value in Alfred’s upgrade. However, it’s hard to not find value in the on-the-spot search results Spotlight provides. For that reason, Spotlight wins our comparison.

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Spotlight App Mac

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