Adding Functionality to Spotlight: FLASHLIGHT

A clever Mac developer reverse-engineered the API for Spotlight to give us the ability to get Google searches rather than Bing when using Spotlight in Yosemite.

The application is called Flashlight and can be downloaded by visiting the page found if you click the name or the image above.

Big thanks to Nate Parrott and many others who have contributed to the project. You may also download the source code at GitHub.

There are more than 100 plugins for this tool - if you find Spotlight as useful as I do, you’ll definitely love Flashlight!

UPDATE: to develop a plugin, check out the instructions provided here.

 

A great utility for RENAMING files (Mac OR Windows)

While I have used their products in the past (A Better Finder Attributes), this morning I discovered this renaming utility from Publicspace.net.

A Better Finder Rename is a neat file renaming utility that I use on my site.

Check out Better File Rename for Windows!

This application offers more renaming options than any of us might need to use ever! As I began developing my new Magento web store (opening later this month, http://20zen.com ) I noticed that all of my filenames have spaces and some have price information, as storing the cost of a product with a scanned image of the cover seemed like a quick fix until I built my database.

With Better Rename I can replace spaces with dashes and even grab picture dimensions from the file to append to the filename, making it easy for me to know which files should be used for dedicated thumbnails and which would be used for zoomed picture links.

You can buy the application from the developer’s website or on the Mac App Store.

Enjoy!