Sebastopol, CA—TidBITS Publishing Inc. is pleased to announce publication of a unique resource for users of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion—Take Control of Spotlight for Finding Anything on Your Mac ($15.00 USD). In this ebook, Mac expert Sharon Zardetto explores the hidden depths of Spotlight searching, one of Mac OS X's most powerful yet least explained features. In the process, she reveals beginner and power-user techniques, including the secret grammar behind Spotlight searches so that readers can search directly using Spotlight's internal query language.

Zardetto first explains how Spotlight indexes data, describes the concepts underlying Spotlight searches, and then illustrates the many ways users can start Spotlight searches: the magnifying glass in the menu bar, the search field in Finder windows or the Open and Save dialogs, a keyboard shortcut, a contextual menu, or customized and saved searches they've made for themselves. She then turns to how readers can find exactly what they're looking for, by employing keyword searches, multiple-criteria searches, Boolean searches, and more.

Searches aren't just about finding lost files, they're also useful for selecting a set of matching files to work on. For instance, Spotlight can be used to identify which photos in a folder are small thumbnails or which of a set of files lack a certain phrase. It's even possible to find every GarageBand song in the key of E-flat.

Readers of this book will learn valuable search-related techniques, including how to:

• Improve search accuracy by limiting Spotlight to searching just where they want.
• Reduce result clutter by choosing which categories appear in the Spotlight menu.
• Learn what to do when the Spotlight menu doesn't list an item that it should be able to find.
• Use criteria bars (and even the elusive Boolean bars!) to create complex search queries.
• Bypass criteria bars by typing complex, powerful queries in any Spotlight search field.
• Build Boolean searches with AND, OR, and NOT to narrow search results precisely.

In addition, they will discover how to make files even easier to find with these techniques:

• Customizing a file's metadata.
• Employing free third-party utilities to give files useful, searchable tags.
• Setting up sophisticated smart folders that provide dynamic file organization.

Zardetto has created a unique resource that explains how to use the Mac's built-in Spotlight search engine to find files, folders, contacts, appointments, songs, and much more, no matter where they are hidden.