A bit of Spotlight playing around

Spotlight continues to evolve, both on the Mac and in iOS.

Try your hand at searching for current information about the weather or your favorite sports team. For example, on my Mac, if I type:

What is the weather

I get a nice chart showing local weather both hourly and daily. In iOS 9 Spotlight, if I type:

weat

(just need the first four letters), I’ll get a short summary of the local weather right now. Tap that cell, and it brings up the Weather app which looks very much like the El Capitan Spotlight results.

On the sports side, in El Capitan Spotlight, if I type:

natio

(first five letters of Nationals, my local baseball team), I get the box score from last night. As I type, spotlight offers to fill in the rest of my query, so when I get what I want, I can just stop typing.

On the iOS 9 side, the results are similar, but not identical. Clearly, they use different natural language parsing engines. And both the iOS 9 and El Cap Spotlight parsing engines seem different than that used by Siri.

Spotlight on the Mac has long been able to function as a calculator. But now that calculator functionality is available in iOS 9. Want to give it a try? Bring up spotlight (on the Mac hit command-space, in iOS 9, pull down from the home screen or swipe right from the first home screen), then type an equation or a conversion:

10 pounds

Or

10 pounds in ounces

The results on the Mac are more comprehensive, but good to know the iOS 9 version can do this. Since iOS 9 Spotlight does not use the numeric keyboard, the calculator is a bit of a pain, but the conversion element works well. And you can tap the result to bring up a Google page to take this further.

Something that’s evolved over the years on the Mac is the Spotlight window itself. Now, in El Capitan, you can click in the Spotlight window to drag it around and, of course, click/drag on the bottom or top edge to make the window shorter or taller.

Once you resize/move the Spotlight window, it’ll keep that form. Want to recenter the window? Click and hold on the spotlight magnifying glass icon in the menu bar. An odd little Easter egg, that.

There is much more to Spotlight than these few examples. And not sure how much of this is brand new, either. But I’ve been playing around, got a bit curious, so now you have to suffer.

Have any other Spotlight tips or tricks? Tweet ’em to me (@davemark) or add them in the comments.