Spotlight always knows what is on your hard drive. It doesn’t have to go through a periodic process to update its index. If you have a Finder window open with “aubergine” in the search field, and let’s just say you don’t have any files that refer to eggplant as aubergine, the window will be empty because it could not find that word in anything. Now add a new document named “ratatouille” and type “aubergine” in the document somewhere. Immediately after you save that document, the ratatouille file will appear in your Finder window.

Finder will display the results of your Spotlight search right in the window

That example was meant to illustrate how quickly Spotlight knows about what is on you computer. But, it also illustrates another feature of Spotlight. The ability to search for stuff inside of files. And it does that just as swiftly. But it doesn’t end with finding text inside of a document, you can search to see which photos you took with a Nikon camera instead of your Canon. You can search for anything on one of the cards in your Address Book. You can search for almost anything.

The easiest way to use Spotlight is to click on the magnifying glass icon in the right side of your menu bar – Apple has a guideline of always putting the search field in the top-right corner of a screen or window. A search field will drop down that you can start typing into. Wait… now might be a good time for me to explain what I mean when I say “search field.” Everyone knows what a text field is, it’s a place to store some text that the user types in or that the computer fills in. Apple has a distinct version of a text field that they call a search field. They’re immediately recognizable because they have rounded sides giving them a pill-like appearance. There will be a magnifying glass in the left side of some of them. If that icon has a little downward facing triangle next to it, you can click on the icon to select recent searches you’ve made.

OK, with that bit of exposition out of the way, lets get back to the Spotlight menu. As I was saying, it is in the top-right corner of the screen. Click on the Spotlight icon and type something into the search field. As you are typing Spotlight will begin searching your computer and returning results. For example, aubergine begins with “au.” If I have anything about Australia, it will show up in the Spotlight menu until I type the “b” in aubergine. Yes, it’s that quick. The Spotlight menu categorizes everything it finds and will return the first few items for each category. If what you’re looking for isn’t there, select the Show All item at the top of the menu. This will open a Finder window with all of the results. By the way, you can rearrange categories and eliminate specific ones from the Spotlight menu by changing your System Preferences for Spotlight. There is also a preference for hiding specific locations from Spotlight.

Get familiar with the Spotlight menu, it's a real time-saver

I said this is the easiest way to use Spotlight. It is and it is also one of the easiest and quickest ways to launch an application. If Spotlight finds an application that’s name matches your search term, that application will be the Top Hit. For example, when I want to launch Pixelmator, I use the Command+Space keyboard shortcut to open the Spotlight menu and then type “pi” followed by the Return key. Since Pixelmator is my Top Hit, it is already highlighted and hitting Return will open it. If I wanted to open my contact card for Fuel Pizza, I would use the down arrow key to move the highlight down until I had selected Fuel Pizza and hit Return. You can also select items from the menu with your mouse.

Spotlight is a great way to find the file you need to open

Have you ever tried to open a file from inside an application and had trouble remembering where it is? No need to answer; that was a rhetorical question. I know the answer is “yes” because it happens to all of us. With Spotlight, you don’t need to remember where it is. Just remember enough about the file so that Spotlight can find it. Every File Open window in Mac OS X has a search field in the top-right corner. Enter your search terms in there and the contents of the sheet will show the results. As with the Finder, you’ll also see a little Spotlight toolbar at the top of the results area. This will allow you to refine your search. It will have a few file locations that you can limit the results to. But, it also has a plus button that adds additional layers of refinement to your search. Clicking that plus button allows you to refine your search by all sorts of things like the kind of file, the camera aperture setting for each photo, and the bit rate of audio files.

This should get you well on your way to becoming a Spotlight guru. Let me know what questions you have about Spotlight and I’ll answer them.

There are quite a few new features. The most visible changes are top sites and tabs on top. They’ve incorporated an Apple TV style view of the top sites that you visit. They’re arranged in a curved matrix displaying a minimum of six pages or as many as 24. By default, it shows 12 of your favorite sites (you can change this by clicking the Edit button in the bottom left corner). Pages that have changed since you last visited them have a very visible star in the top right corner. You can rearrange the pages by dragging and dropping them, and you can pin them to a specific place so it’s always there. You can always get back to the Top Sites view by selecting Show Top Sites from the History menu or by keying Command + Shift + 1.

Safari displays your top sites when you first start it up

Tabs on top frees up some of your screen’s real estate to give more space for the window content. It does this by moving tabs from their own bar to the title bar. It doesn’t appear that you can turn off the tabs feature anymore; there is always a plus button in the top right corner of the window that you can click on to create a new tab. Another change that they’ve added is a handle on each tab you can use to re-order them, or drag them to another window, or tear them off to create their own window.

Another big change to the interface is the addition of Cover Flow to you bookmarks. I can see this coming in very handy particularly for the collection of recipes I have bookmarked. Since history is viewed from the same area as your bookmarks, you can also view your history using Cover Flow.

I'll definitely use Cover Flow to browse my recipes

Also using Cover Flow is the new history search, which lets you search through all the text on any of the pages in your history. I honestly thought Safari 3 already did this, but perhaps it wasn’t able to search against the full text of pages in your history.

Less obvious visually, but something that should be noticeable when you visit sites that use a lot of scripting (such as Digg) is Apple’s new JavaScript engine which they now call the Nitro Engine. According to a variety of benchmark results that Apple published, Nitro Engine gives Safari a performance lead over Google’s Chrome which held the fastest browser crown for a short while.

I don’t particularly like Apple’s new full-page zoom mode that takes over where their old text zooming left off. Safari now scales images along with the text and as a result if you’d already right-sized your window with the green button on the top left corner of the Safari window, you’ll need to keep right-sizing it again every time you zoom in or out. I preferred the old way where only the text was increased or reduced because I rarely think to myself “that image is just too small to see.” Thankfully you can toggle between full-page and text-only zooming by selecting Zoom Text Only from the View menu.

They have improved their address and search fields with this release, though. Typing into the address field will give you some options to choose from rather than typing out the full address. Safari will give you a top hit that they say best matches your browsing history, it will also suggest pages you’ve visited recently from your history, as well as a selection of relevant pages from your bookmarks. Typing in the search field will give you some search suggestions via Google and will also give you some other search terms you’ve tried recently. Apple has also made is easier for people to… find the Find feature by placing it at the end of these suggestions. Now you can go to the bottom of these suggestions to find your search terms in the current page. That’s a pretty neat way to expose some functionality that is normally only used by people familiar with the Command + F keyboard shortcut or the Edit menu.

Safari offers suggestions when you type in the Address or Search field

They’ve included a lot of other changes “under the hood” that should result in a much improved browsing experience once Safari 4 is released and once web developers take advantage of some of the leading-edge standards that Safari supports. But, the last new feature I want to mention is that Safari now uses an iPhone Safari style progress indicator in the same position as on the iPhone (to the right of the address field) rather than filling the address field background with a blue bar as the page loads. Consistency is a good thing.

If you’re adventurous and would like to know how to tweak a few of the new things added such as turning off the search suggestions, check out Observation Point for the piece called Hidden Preferences in Safari 4 Public Beta.

Oh, and if you’re still on Windows, you might like the fact that Apple has gone with a native Windows look and feel for Safari 4. No longer will Safari for Windows have a Macintosh theme applied to it.

Exposé whisks your windows into view to ease switching between them

This is very useful for finding the window you want to be working in at the moment. It might be better than using the Command+` keyboard shortcut depending on how you like to work. But, it has even more usefulness than that. If you’re working in one window and you want to drag something out of it into a different window, Exposé works for that too. All you have to do is:

1. start your drag
2. activate Exposé
3. hover over the window that you want to drop onto
4. deactivate Exposé
5. complete your drag & drop

Quickly tapping the Exposé key will reveal the windows and they’ll hang there in space waiting for you to do something. But, if you hold down the Exposé key, the windows will rearrange themselves only for as long as you hold down the key. Once you lift your finger, the windows will go back to normal. Holding the Exposé key is a good way to handle dragging & dropping.

You can also activate Exposé through a variety of ways that can be set in your System Preferences. Select the Exposé & Spaces System Preference and you can set Exposé to activate by moving your pointer to one of the four screen corners, typing keystrokes, or clicking mouse buttons.

Use these Exposé settings or experiment with your own

The normal behavior for the Exposé key is exposing All Windows. Holding the Command key while pressing the Exposé key will move all the windows out of the way to reveal the Desktop. This is helpful since current Apple keyboards only have one function key labeled with the Exposé icon. Using the Command modifier key means you don’t have to remember which other unlabeled function key you may have assigned the Exposé – Desktop command to. Use the same keyboard shortcut to bring the windows back to normal (if you aren’t using the hold method from above). You can also modify the behavior of Exposé by holding the Control key while pressing the Exposé key to show only the current Application Windows. Again, use the same keyboard shortcut to bring the windows back to normal. Finally, for some fun, you can hold down the Shift key while pressing the Exposé key to watch the animations in slow-motion.

Keyboard shortcuts for taking screenshots

On the Mac, you basically have the same two kinds of screenshots. You can take a full screen shot by holding the Shift and Command keys while pressing the 3 key. Doing so will result in the screenshot being saved to your desktop as a PNG image file.

You can also take a partial (or selective) screenshot. But, on the Mac you’re not limited to just taking a shot of your current window. Holding the Shift and Command keys while pressing the 4 key will change your pointer into a cross-hair with two sets of numbers indicating the coordinates of the current pointer position. You can click-and-drag the cross-hair to draw a rectangle on the screen that frames whatever portion you want a screenshot of. If you’d rather just take a screenshot of a window, simply move the cross-hair over the window you want a shot of and press the Spacebar. Your pointer will turn into a camera and the window that you’ll take a shot of will be highlighted. Click to take a shot of the currently highlighted window.

Both of these methods will will result in the screenshot being saved to your desktop as a PNG image file. But, if you don’t have a need to save the shot as an image and just need to use it temporarily, you can modify either of those two keyboard shortcuts by also holding down Control before hitting either 3 or 4. This will place the shot into your clipboard and you can then paste as you usually would wherever you’d like. Using the extra Control key modifier will give you a behavior more like Windows.