OS X :: Spotlight Search Inside Bundles (running Snow Leopard)?
Apr 29, 2010
I have a PDF library located inside a bundle. Spotlight does not appear to search inside this bundle even if I trigger the search from inside it. I need it to index the PDFs to allow searching for key words in the text of the PDFs. If I remove the PDFs from the bundle Spotlight works fine, but I then loose some functionality of the software that I am using. how to make spotlight do this? I am running Snow Leopard.
As jingle-pundits desperately try to denigrate Snow Leopard as a "Service Pack," Apple's new operating system reference release actually expands the reach of the Mac platform in several important and under-reported new directions. Here's the second in a series looking closer at some of Snow Leopard's well-known, but often misrepresented or misunderstood features.
The 64-bit Kernel
It seems fashionable to describe Snow Leopard's new 64-bit kernel as a problem for Mac users with 32-bit EFI (the startup firmware that launches the operating system). It's true, 64-bit Core2 Duo machines prior to 2008 still run Snow Leopard's 64-bit apps using a 32-bit kernel, because Apple's 64-bit kernel requires both a 64-bit processor (a Core2 Duo or better) and 64-bit EFI.
The 64-bit edition of Windows XP or Vista will run on 64-bit Macs with 32-bit EFI via Boot Camp because Windows doesn't use EFI; it still lives in the simpler world of BIOS.
However, running a 64-bit kernel on these machines is of limited benefit. While there are certain advantages with the move to a 64-bit kernel, including new security enhancements, the primary benefit of a 64-bit kernel is being able to directly work with significantly more than 4GB of RAM, something that most existing consumer Macs and generic PCs can't do anyway.
For this reason, Snow Leopard also defaults to running its 32-bit kernel even on consumer models with 64-bit EFI. This prevents mainstream users from running into problems related to incompatible kernel extensions and device drivers (such as printer software), which aren't yet 64-bit.
This problem has helped repress the popularity of the 64-bit editions of Windows over the last several years, but won't hold up 64-bit Mac adoption because there is only one edition of Snow Leopard, one that runs on all Intel Macs and simply adjusts itself to the limitations of the given hardware.
Users who want to run the new 64-bit kernel on late modeled Macs (pretty much anything released after early 2008) can do so by booting with the 6 and 4 keys held down. If you're wondering whether your Mac has a 64-bit EFI firmware, you can type the command "ioreg -l -p IODeviceTree | grep firmware-abi" into the Terminal. The response will identify the machine as either having 32-bit or 64-bit EFI.
64-bit System Apps
What Snow Leopard does do is bring all Core2 Duo, 64-bit Macs (pretty much everything sold since 2007) up to speed with 64-bit system apps, from the Finder and Dock to iChat and Mail to background processes such as launchd and the system-wide spell checker. Running the 64-bit kernel or not, the singular version of Snow Leopard always runs 64-bit apps when running on 64-bit hardware; in contrast, no 32-bit editions of Windows can run 64-bit apps, even on 64-bit capable hardware.
Snow Leopard's upgrade to 64-bit system apps provides an overall speed boost due to limitations in the original design of Intel's 32-bit chips; the move to the new 64-bit x64 processor model, originally developed by AMD, solves these issues. Moving to 64-bit apps on other processor families, such as PowerPC, does not yield the same boost, but rather only incurs additional overhead, one of the reasons Snow Leopard is Intel-only.
Windows XP/Vista/7 users also benefit from running 64-bit apps, but Windows can only run 64-bit apps using the 64-bit kernel provided with the 64-bit "edition." This prevents mainstream generic PC users from realizing the benefits of the move to 64-bits unless they are equipped to make the full jump, which requires lining up 64-bit kernel drivers for all their hardware. This sticky bit has kept 64-bit adoption on Windows very low despite the significant advantages related to making the move.
Snow Leopard does not share this problem, because it has no problem running 64-bit apps using its 32-bit kernel. Additionally, Apple's unique Universal Binary specification packs both 32-bit and 64-bit code into each application, making Snow Leopard's 64-bit capable apps backwardly compatible with 32-bit Macs.
64-bit Third Party Apps
Snow Leopard also lays a strong foundation for 64-bit third party apps. While Leopard could run 64-bit graphical apps and even Tiger could run 64-bit background processes, the delivery of 64-bit Mac apps is just getting started. Even Apple is behind the curve on that front, with iWork, iLife, iTunes, and even its Pro Apps all still in 32-bit land. Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite are also waiting for a 64-bit overhaul.
Snow Leopard's 64-bit kernel enables new generations of Macs that can use far more memory, unlocking new potential and more efficient performance by easing existing bottlenecks and allowing more aggressive caching, particularly for kernel i/o such as disk access. Third party Mac software titles that can benefit from the jump to 64-bits will likely begin to transition to full 64-bit capable binaries at a faster pace than the Windows side overall, because the majority of the installed base of Windows PCs are still running the 32-bit edition of XP, which unlike Snow Leopard, can't run 64-bit apps at all.
Snow Leopard delivers a performance boost to existing users of 64-bit Macs, but it really lays a foundation for 64-bit, high performance computing in the next few years. Thanks to the long standing 32-bit barrier that has held up the PC demand for large amounts of memory, RAM is now cheaper than ever, making the ability to install large amounts of memory that the operating system can actually use something that mainstream Mac users will hold as an advantage over the mainstream of 32-bit PC users.
That's because mainstream generic PCs are limited not just to 4GB of RAM, but also incur additional artificial limitations under Windows, where the operating system takes 2GB leaving only 2GB available for the running application. Mac OS X, like Linux, has always allowed applications the full 4GB available on the Intel architecture. This difference has given Windows a translation lookaside buffer performance advantage in the past, but Snow Leopard's new 64-bit applications erase this lead and instead provide Macs with the upper hand relative to the billion installed base of Windows PCs.
Additionally, as all modern Macs transition to 64-bit apps in a single leap, the Windows installed base will effectively splinter between the mass market of low end, 32-bit offerings (including the large increase in netbooks) and the higher end of 64-bit pros and gamers who will collectively amount to a population not dramatically larger than the Mac installed base, dramatically leveling the competitive playing field in the 64-bit arena.
64-bit Cocoa
Meanwhile, Apple is now arriving back to its original strategy in delivering Cocoa as the primary graphical API for Mac OS X applications. This marks the end of Apple's decade of compatibility appeasement to Adobe and Microsoft, both of whom led a third-party refusal to update existing apps from the old Mac OS routines to the advanced new frameworks Apple acquired from Steve Job's NeXT. Going forward, anyone who wants to deliver 64-bit graphical apps has to build them using a Cocoa interface.
Apple was powerless to force the issue a decade ago, when the Mac platform didn't seem to have much potential left and the new Mac OS X could not offer any guarantees of its survival or success to third party developers. That has all changed. Apple now operates a strong platform that has been rapidly outpacing the growth in generic PC sales by a significant factor for several years now.
Developers now know there is money to be made in shipping third party apps for Mac OS X. Additionally, the tools used to build new Mac apps are essentially identical to those used to develop apps for the iPhone and iPod touch, the leading mobile platform by a wide margin.
Apple's singular focus on Cocoa will greatly simplify the company's development efforts, as it won't be having to move both Cocoa and Carbon into graphical 64-bit land. While Adobe has complained that Apple's decision to freeze Carbon in a 32-bit maintenance mode has prevented it from delivering a 64-bit version of CS4, the simplified Cocoa roadmap will force Adobe to get on the ball with the next release, upgrading Creative Suite in two directions (Cocoa and 64-bit) rather than dragging along the Carbon past into another decade.
Microsoft and other significant Mac developers will also have to get on the Cocoa bandwagon in order to stay relevant on Apple's 64-bit Mac platform for the next decade. The Mac already has much more visibility, market relevance and software profitability than its market share would suggest, thanks in part to Apple's bold capacity to decisively burn its legacy bridges in order to give developers a single, clear option for future development, just as it did on the iPhone.
Of course, Apple itself needs to deliver 64-bit versions of its own Logic Studio, Final Cut Studio, and Aperture, too. The company was previously outpaced by its third party developers in the move to PowerPC, and to a lesser extent, in the move to Intel Macs. Apple's position as both a platform vendor and an application developer should help it to deliver practical, usable tools for its own developers.
Apple's leadership in laying out a strong 64-bit future in Snow Leopard has created a strong foundation that will enable the Mac to move ahead in important ways. However, there's more going on in Snow Leopard than just new progress in supporting 64-bit CPUs. The next segment will look at how Apple has pioneered efficient use of GPUs, and what it means for today's Macs and for coming generations.
Inside Mac OS X Snow Leopard: QuickTime X Inside Mac OS X Snow Leopard: GPU Optimization Inside Mac OS X Snow Leopard: Exchange Support Inside Mac OS X Snow Leopard: Malware Protection
I have a file, myfile.csv, that contains the string qqabc. A (Lion) Spotlight search for the string qqabc fails to return myfile.csv in the results. Turning all checkboxes on in Spotlight preferences didn't help. Reindexing the internal hard drive didn't help either. When I changed the extension to .zzz, the search worked. How can I make Spotlight return myfile.csv in the results? EasyFind works, by the way, but I have a reason for wanting Spotlight to work.
Snow Leopard's abandonment of Creator Code metadata, used to open a file with its creating application, has some users are worried that Apple has killed off a core Mac-centric feature. Instead, Apple has invented a superior alternative for the old Creator Code in order to support a variety of new features. Here's why, and what the new Uniform Type Identifiers offer. What is a Creator Code?
Back in the early 80s, Apple developed a variety of unique conventions to make the Macintosh intuitively easy to use, almost to a magical extent. One example pertains to invisible file metadata that helped the system identify documents using Type and Creator Codes. Each file was tagged with both a Type and a Creator, allowing the system to distinguish between applications that could open a file and the default application that should open the file. The Finder could also use this invisibly associated file metadata to present custom file icons for different files of the same type but created by different applications, such as two JPEGs, one saved by Graphic Converter and the other by Photoshop..............
I heard that Google can't/doesn't search anything inside of an iFrame (which iWeb utilizes). Is this true? I'm wondering because we've had a web presence for years now and we still don't seem to be coming up very high in searches, and our competitors do. I have submitted a sitemap to google (and other search engines) and tried to have relevant text and keywords on our homepage. Here is my website, created with iWeb. [URL]
Sometimes titles do not match the content. If I have a bunch of files with similar title, i.e. Chapter 1, 2, etc., but I want to find the chapter with the jabberwock in it, I used to be able to type "jabberwock" and it would come up in my search window. Now it's only finding titles. I have so many files on my puter that it's taking me forever to find important documents. Where did they hide this feature??? Tearing my hair out.
If I had to pick one thing that is a fundamental feature of the OS, not just Mac OS but any OS, it's the ability to find files - and that functionality is all but completely broken in Leopard. Spotlight in Leopard absolutely sucks. It doesn't find files, it's slow, and there are few options for how to sort found files.
I can't count the number of times that I have tried using it to quickly locate a file, but it can't find it, even thought it's right there on my hard drive. I manually navigate to the file, and yep, I spelled it right...there it is. But it just doesn't appear in the Spotlight results list.
One of the biggest gripes i have with Leopard is Spotlight. I have a 4gb usb drive i put mp3s on to listen to in my car and every time i plug it in Spotlight starts indexing it which means i get stuck with slower read/write speeds until it is done. Is there any way in 10.6 to turn off Spotlight for external drives?
I've been using happily Snow Leopard for a couple of weeks now but last night it just started freezing. Everytime I open Spotlight and look for something I see the spinning beachball... the mouse still works but NOTHING else does (Dock, menus, Finder)... everything just freezes.
When using spotlight I set my preferences so it doesn't find music and some other things. It works great for the spotlight popup, but in windowed mode, which searches "this mac", still searches for everything. Is there a way to get the windowed mode to only search the things I specified in spotlight?
Earlier I posted a problem about the get info pane has something wrong in it, that the "more info" only shows the headline, while other things, like dimensions for the pictures, the bitrate of MP3 songs, etc.
you can't sort your spotlight results by size unless you are in Icon view. How did they leave that out of List view? That is the only feature I'd hoped would be introduced in SL. It makes Spotlight searches as useless as they were in 10.5.
The search integration of Spotlight with TextEdit: Typing in a search term in Spotlight, then opening one of the resulting files in TextEdit, then choosing Find in TextEdit used to immediately bring up the very same search term from Spotlight, so that you wouldn't have to type the very same (potentially very long) term all over again to go straight to the spot in the file.
Spotlight has been indexing for four days now,; all it says is 'estimating indexing time.' Meanwhile, i can't search for anythign on my hard drive. how can i make it stop?
The problem I am having is that my spotlight runs fine and then after a period of using my imac (2 hours) the searches take longer and longer to do. This happens when I am searching using a window. So by holding the alt cmd space bar and then keying in my keywords.
If i search by going to the magnifying glass in the menu bar it searches as normal but then clicking on show all results its back to being slow. If I reboot the mac it continues to run fast and then eventually goes slow. I have tried rebuilding the spotlight databases but this has not helped.
I'm using OSX Snow Leopard. Spotlight was unable to find a document in a folder. It found several others that have almost the same name, but not the one I was looking for. By scrolling down in the finder window I found it without spotlight right away.
To better explain my problem:
I was looking for a document that was called "Paperless". Spotlight found several document in different folders like "Paperlessone", Paperless2" etc. But not able to find "Paperless"
I checked the Spotlight options and it says, that it is looking for everything.
An odd problem that has recurred on two of the installations of Snow Leopard I've had on my 27" iMac is that for some odd reason, using Spotlight will cause a slow system death.
I've had Snow Leopard since the day it came out. And I installed it that same day. Since then Spotlight is constantly indexing and will not stop. I noticed about a week after installation when I went to use stoplight and it wouldn't let me because it was indexing. Now fast forward to today I still haven't fixed this problem because I never really needed to use it. So no I have the need, and I need to fix this problem. BTW I'm using a 13" aluminum Mac Book bought around June '09 the model right before the current 13" aluminum Mac Book Pro's
It's actually one of five partions on the external drive, and the only one with a problem. Two of the other four are nicely on the Privacy List, and the other two are both indexed and kept nicely up to date. But the Fifth cannot be indexed, although it once was partially. I have run Spotless, which lists all other drives just as I expect but for this one it reports: "The Metadata Server is reporting that content indexing is DISABLED for the volume Fifth but the volume itself is reporting that the content indexing status is set to ENABLED." It is possible to find an 8Kb index on the volume, then Trash and delete it; Spotlight immediately re-creates another index-in-waiting but does not actually do the indexing or add anything in the folder. An added frustration is that the 'folder' is both invisible, locked and seems to be without 'ownership' or other conventional attributes.
1) I have done the primitive Add to Privacy and Remove Dance nothing has changed.
2) I have used Terminal, deleted all .Spotlight-V100 indexes, disabled Spotlight rebooted, renabled it and rebooted—nothing has changed. This included carefully following steps in other posters' accounts (some failed, some succeeded) and a site that gave a particularly thorough version.
3) I have used Spotless although it offers to do such things as Delete the empty index and re-start Indxing, it then reports it couldn't due to an unexpected error.
4) Some folks have pointed to another faulty invisible file variously naming it '.metadate_never_index' and '.metadataneverindex', to be found in '.hostconfig' or eleswhere at the root and destroyed, but I never didscovered anything like it. I did perhaps succeed in adding the line: SPOTLIGHT=-YES- to that file, based on another bit of advice, but it seems to have had no effect.
The terrible irony is that I use FindAnyFile and good ol' FileBuddy for all my searching. All I want is to 'Show Item Info' in Finder's View Options. Wouldn't you know that needs the Spotlight 'app'.Assuming the Spotless message is accurate, I need to convince the MetadataServer that indexing for that partition is enabled. How do I do that
I'm searching for a file in Finder. When I select "Preferences", which is the directory I'm in, it finds the file but when I select "This Mac" it doesn't.
I am pretty new with Mac and I am trying out my new macbook pro. I'm trying to get to know it. And a while ago I was trying the Spotlight feature. I have a file under User/Library/Preferences/ that is called [URL] I just thought I'd try to search for it on Spotlight if it can find it. I typed myname123 on spotlight but no results were found. Why? Are there any specific strings that should be entered if the search string is between a filename?
I'd like to install SL on my macbook air 2.13.... but I have a couple of questions for you, who already did it. Is the "spotlight search window" still flickering during a research? (it seems a problem related with SSD machines in Leopard). Is it now warmer? colder? same? How about the fan? Did you notice changes in the way SL use it? Battery life? This machine with SSD is pretty snappy... is it even faster now?
I have a very odd problem. Spotlight can't find TextEdit anymore, even if I type the name of the app fully in the field. The app is right where it should be in the Applications folder. It hasn't been excluded from search and I have done a reindex of Spotlight but the problem persists. Other apps come up exactly right.
