Extend your Spotlight Search with Spotlaser

ByMike Moffit

Spotlaser is an easy to use shareware application that makes finding files on your really large hard drive easy!

The Spotlaser search bar at the top of the Spotlaser window provides the ability to perform a quick filename-only search, much like the way searches worked in previous versions (pre 10.4) of Mac OS X. This enables you to find that file without sorting through all the extra files that a normal Spotlight search would throw at you. Use the wildcard character * if you don’t know the exact name of the file you’re after.

There’s also the ability to search specific locations, by time frame, author, composer, content, metatags and much, much more.

What I like most about it is that it finds what I expect. I’m often surprised by files found using Searchlight as they don’t seem relative – Spotlaser seems more accurate, though not quite as fast.

Similar Posts

  • Alternative Video Players For Mac

    While I love Quicktime and the good old Quicktime Player (especially for watching H.264 High-Definition footage, there are times when I want to…

  • Boot Camp in the Retail Store

    First it was the OnMac.net hack, now it’s up with Apple’s official Boot Camp! Stop by and see it in our Retail Showroom…

  • Home (Network) Improvement

    Summer is (un)officially here and with that, home improvement season has begun too. Do you want to upgrade your home network? Do you…

  • Applecare & Consumer Reports

    Here at Small Dog, we get a many inquiries about the value of Applecare. Personally, I always recommend buying Applecare – especially for…

  • Bamboo Fun!

    When you get your first Apple computer, you step into our realm knowing that you are purchasing one of the best creative machines…

  • Protecting Your Photographs

    Let me ask you a few questions: Do you have a digital camera? How many megapixels does your camera shoot? How many years and how many photos do you have on your computer? Now imagine this… tomorrow morning you wake up and turn your computer on. It boots slower than normal and all you see is a flashing question mark on a gray screen. Your heart drops and you start to think about all of the memories that made up your iPhoto library.

    The purpose of all this is to get you thinking about how many pictures you take every week and what would happen if one day you lost all of them. Could be 10 days or 10 years of photos; either way your losing all of those precious memories. Your best solution is to backup your files. The key to a true backup is to have your files in two places. My suggestion is to purchase a pair of identical external hard drives. Several hard drive units ranging from 250 gigabytes to 2 terabytes are becoming more and more affordable.

    Click here to see Small Dog’s selection of external hard drives.

    When you’re finished with your photo shoot, birthday party or vacation, store your photos on your computer and then back it up to your external hard drive. It may also be good to store your external hard drive in a different location than your computer and pull it out once a week to backup your new work. I like to go one step further and backup my backup. My setup includes my MacBook which is backed up onto an external hard drive which is then mirrored to a second external hard dive. This allows me to delete some photos off my MacBook to free up space while still leaving my photos on two different locations.