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Mac OS X ’s Spotlight hunt engineering makes it easy to search the contents of documents on your Mac ’s hard drive . But what if you ’ve embraced our cloud - storage future and keep some — or all — of your papers online usingGoogle Docs ?
Precipitate , a project host onGoogle Code , is a System Preference pane that lets Spotlight search your Google Docs , Google Bookmarks , andPicasaonline photo albums . Specifically , Precipitate connects to Google ’s servers and then create , on your Mac , limelight - compatible exponent files that are searched by Spotlight . It then update those indicant periodically .
To set up Precipitate , you set up and open up the predilection pane , enter your Google account statement username and password , prefer which contentedness — docs , bookmark , and albums — you want to be able to search using Spotlight , and then tap Refresh Now . The initial indexing will take at least a few minutes , and could take importantly longer , depending on how much content the computer software needs to index . After that , you just utilize Spotlight as you normally would ; search results domicile on Google ’s servers expose the appropriate icon — Google Son processor , Google spreadsheet , and so on .
Because Precipitate has to regularly agree Google ’s servers for change to your online subject , it can take a while for any changes you make to documents , bookmarks , or record album to be reflected in the indexes on your Mac . The Precipitate documentation claim that updates to online data wo n’t be reflected in Spotlight search for “ up to an hr , ” but it can in reality take longer than that . ( you’re able to always force a refresh via the predilection pane . ) Another restriction of Precipitate is that if you ’ve got multiple Google Docs account , Precipitate only lets you sign into — and , thus , search — one story at a time .
Updated 6/11/09 3:30pm : Clarified that Precipitate is host on Google Code , not a production of Google Code .
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[ Dan Frakes is a Macworld aged editor . ]
