Even though Apple’s Spotlight indexing routine is a quick and convenient way to find files and folders on your system, for any given search it may give you a rather large set of results, especially if you only use a short or common search term. If you find yourself burdened by how Spotlight presents its search results to you, there are several ways you can go about making them more convenient. Continue reading
How to increase the efficiency of the Spotlight menu in OS X
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While OS X is built to be simple, there are often times when I see people taking many unnecessary steps to perform basic operations on their Macs. For instance, to find a buried window, some people may resort to shuffling those in the foreground to the edges of the screen, in order to reveal those underneath.
If you need to look up how much of your Mac’s disk space is being used, you can simply choose About This Mac from the Apple menu, and then click the More Info button to bring up the system information summary. In here, you can click the Storage section, to see all attached hard drives and a colorized breakdown of the file types and sizes stored on each. While this feature is convenient, sometimes it may not show an accurate breakdown of the space used. 
The Terminal in OS X is a relatively powerful environment, where you have access to a number of scriptable tools that can help you configure, gather information, and otherwise use your Mac in ways that you cannot otherwise do with a mouse and graphical elements. Granted some of these more advanced features of the terminal require extensive experience, but if you are just getting started, then you might wonder how you simply find files in the Terminal. 
When browsing the Web, reading documents in programs TextEdit or Pages, you might come across a word or two that you do not know, or perhaps you are composing a document and need to look up synonyms. While there are online options such as Dictionary.com and its sister site Thesaurus.com which offer great word research tools, Apple includes a couple of quick ways to look up a word in OS X.