Spotlight? NotLight. And What About QuarkXPress 7?
I find the Spotlight feature in Mac OS X maddening. It has such potential and its interface does nothing but get in my way. A useful alternative is Matt Neuburg’s free NotLight. It uses Spotlight’s index to find files, but lets you easily perform more-precise searches and gives more-useful results. You can use asterisks as wild cards, choose case sensitivity, use AND, OR and NOT, and search within the found results. You can also search by relative time to find all files modified within a period of time (time Ago or From Now), and save search parameters for future use.
You can read Dan Frake’s review in Macworld here.
By the way, I’m still waiting for a Spotlight plug-in for QuarkXPress 7. Quark released one for QuarkXPress 3, 4, 5 and 6, but nothing yet for 7. It can search for text, font names, style sheets and layout names in version 6 documents, but only for text in documents last saved by earlier versions.
Jay Nelson is the editorial director of PlanetQuark.com, and the editor and publisher of Design Tools Monthly. He’s also the author of the QuarkXPress 8 and QuarkXPress 7 training titles at Lynda.com, as well as the training videos Quark includes in the box with QuarkXPress 7 . In addition, Jay writes regularly for Macworld and Photoshop User magazines and speaks at industry events.
I mentioned this in the Quark Suggestions Forum and was told by Quark to expect a Spotlight filter for QuarkXPress 7 within 45 days.
That’s excellent news! Based on the timing, I’m guessing that Quark is waiting for Apple to release Mac OS X 10.5 Tiger, which is due in October. That way, their Spotlight filter won’t have to be written twice. But that’s just a guess.