Nik's Blog

Geekery, witty insights, software (of dubious quality) and more!

Create Complex Searches in Spotlight

You can do complex boolean searches in spotlight’s search field by including parenthesis, AND, and OR statements. Unfortunately, a lot of metadata is not available via Spotlight’s keyword searches, but is available via the Finder’s search window as “Other” criteria. Luckily, you can add boolean operators using the Find window and an undocumented trick.

If you hold down the option key while clicking the “+” button in the search criteria (it will change from “+” to “…”) to add a boolean operator (any of, none of, all of) and can nest these operators and other criteria as deeply as you want to.

The new version of Spotlight is also quite a bit faster when dealing with these complex queries, so you can go nuts.

If you’re wondering, the search shown above will find any files that either have a red or orange label or which are neither folders, aliases nor documents that have been opened in the past day or modified in the past week. I use this search as a “Current Projects” folder.

@inik

inik: RT @alexismadrigal: Yup, @Salon cut the number of stories they post, increased their quality, and got a 40% traffic boost. http://t.co/X ... >
inik: RT @mikememoli: "The NFL: We're working on that whole brain injury thing." >
inik: I am a sucker for dog ads. Add Ponda Baba and it's like bliss. >
inik: Live stream only available to Verizon customers. Wonder how much that cost them. Anyone know? #superbowl >
inik: #superbowl >

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I love Seth's quote at the top. I think that's my new motto.. ; )

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Griping about OS X Lion? Here's two nifty tools that replace a variety of poorly supported third party tools: Command-line and Automator access to video and audio conversion. Super easy to use, and very flexible and supports any format that Quicktime can encode/decode. (So Perian is a must-install if you want to handle DivX/3viX, etc.)

Yes, ffmpeg, Handbrake and...
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Fix Google Reader's horrible new interface with this user script! Now it fits nicely on my MacBook's small screen. >
Happy 11/11/11 11:11:11! >
What makes this ad awesome is not the true-to-life irony, because the idea is hardly innovative, but rather the excellent execution. Reminds me a bit of that excellent Nutri-Grain spec commercial. Quick delivery, good actors, hit all the high notes. Love it. >