With OS X Yosemite, Apple made Spotlight search more powerful than ever. Two major new features are, of course, Spotlight Suggestions and Web Searches. Unfortunately, they only work for a select group of countries. Why would you geo-restrict wikipedia or iMDB searches? Why wouldn’t you show iTunes and Mac App Store suggestions to everybody? No clue.
But, before ( some of ) you will actually start question a few things, here’s something that aims to fix and improve this issue. Something that will make you forget Apple is screwing you one feature at the time. Something that will bring you back in the state of mind that you own an expensive piece of hardware that it’s running the world’s most advanced OS. An OS that is broken even after a first update.
Introducing Flashlight – the missing plugin system for Spotlight.
Flashlight is a lightweight, free app. You just download it ( here ) and move it to your /Applications/ folder. When you open it up all you have to do is turn it on ( ON/OFF button at the upper left corner ) and then turn ON or OFF all the plugins that you think will be useful for you, that will improve your Spotlight experience.
For example…
1. Weather Instantly – See a forecast without leaving Spotlight, or hit Enter for a more detailed forecast on the web.
2. Using natural language in your searches – Flashlight uses sophisticated natural language processing to understand commands. So you can say stuff like send these files to chen and atty with the subject Presentation Slides, and your computer will understand.
3. Wolfram Alpha – Just type “ask Wolfram Alpha where Abraham Lincoln was born,” and get an answer without even hitting Enter.
4. Terminal commands – Type a command, hit enter, and it’s run. If you’ve got Finder open, commands are run in your currently-open folder by default.
5. Search the web – Type g yoursearchhere and hit enter to Google something instantly — or use ddg or gi to search DuckDuckGo or Google Images. You can even browse results right inside Spotlight.
And so much more.
