Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 8:
In some applications, such as Transmit (left), the Check for
Updates command appears in the application menu—the one with the
same name as the application. In others, such as Excel (right), it
appears in the Help menu. Wording may also differ between apps.
Work with Rule-based Searches
When you put together a rule-based search—whether it's a smart folder in the Finder or a
smart playlist in iTunes—you let your Mac do the tedious work of identifying items (files,
messages, songs, and so on) that are of interest to you. This saves you the time and effort of
manually looking through many potential matches for just the right thing. Define the search
once, and even if it's extremely complex, you can repeat it whenever you want with just one
click—a classic automation shortcut.
Advanced searches in the Finder, rules in Mail, smart playlists in iTunes, and numerous
other environments—including some in third-party apps such as Hazel (see
Organize Files
with Hazel
)
and DEVONthink—use a nearly identical interface for finding things based on a
seriesofconditions.Onceyou'velearnedhowtoconstructoneoftheserule-basedsearchesin
one place, you can recycle that knowledge, with minor variations, in lots of different places,
many of which I cover in the next topic (
Create and Use Smart Containers
)
.
Before we begin, let me clarify some basic concepts:
•
Condition:
A
condition
(sometimes called a
criterion
) is any piece of
information used to identify an item you're searching for—a word in a filename,
a modification date, the sender of an email message, and so on.
•
Multiple conditions:
A search can have more than one condition, which can
be used together or individually.
For example, I can search for all files that
both
(a) contain the word “book”
and
(b)weremodifiedwithinthelastweek,inwhichcasefilesthathaveoneofthose
attributes but not the other wouldn't show up in such a search. This is known
as an All search, because all the conditions must match. Or I can search for files
