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Tips and tricks to help you use your Macintosh |
By Terry Lawrence, program director MacWest Computer Society, Vancouver. British Columbia What is Sherlock? With the introduction of Mac OS 8.5 in the summer of 1998, the old Find File search engine was merged with a new internet search tool named Sherlock. Sherlock also incorporates a keyword index search engine which enables you to search your Hard Disk(s) for files or documents by content or keywords. The internet end of Sherlock is something like a Meta search engine, which searches the files and indexes of many other search engines such as Yahoo, WebCrawler, Alti Vista, Excite, etc., and returns the results in a priorized list with bar graphs showing the probability that a particular site found is what you are looking for. Sherlock is a very fast and powerful tool for internet searches, as well as for finding that unfinished letter to Mom you wrote and saved to some long forgotten file on your Hard Disk. Using Sherlock to search the Internet. Sherlock can look for information on the Internet that you request in plain English, so you can dispense with the http://www...com., etc., and just type in a description of what you are looking for. For instance, if you wanted to find some Hubble Telescope photos for desktop pictures or your kid’s science project, just type in something like: “Find Hubble Space Telescope photos”, click ‘Search‘, and before you know it, Sherlock has brought up a list of 94 websites connected with the Hubble Space Telescope, and the first one on the list reads “Hubble Space Telescope photos”! Click on the link and away you go. To do an Internet search, open Sherlock by opening the Apple menu (the little apple icon) on the top left of your display, and dragging down to the Sherlock icon, which is a little “Sherlock Holmes” magnifying glass. Release the mouse button, and Sherlock should open. You can also put a handy Sherlock Icon in your Menu Bar and / or Control Strip, but I’ll explain how to do that later. Once Sherlock is open, you will see three tabs across the top of the window. The one on the right says “Search Internet”. Click on that tab, and a window will open with a space for you to type in your search criteria. Just type what you want Sherlock to look for in plain English. For example, I have an interest in Aerospace technology, and I was wondering what has become of the Energia super heavy lift rocket booster, developed in the Soviet Union in the late ‘80’s, since the USSR fell apart. So I just typed in “energia rocket” (Sherlock is not case sensitive, so no need to capitalize your words or sentences). Sherlock came up with 152 listings relating to the Energia rocket for me to check out, and priorized them according to how many of the search words appeared, and how often they appeared on each site. For example, a book about space exploration that mentioned the Energia rocket only once or twice would have a much lower priority than an article which specifically dealt with the Energia rocket, and mentioned it many times. Toward the bottom of the list would be web sites or articles which mentioned only “Energia”, or only “rocket”. The sites found are listed in a new window that Sherlock opens when you hit the ‘search’ button after typing in your request. This window has two panes: the upper pane lists the sites found on the left, with a bar graph bar showing their relevance in the center, and the website location (URL) on the right. IMPORTANT On the right side of the ‘sites found’ window, just above the upper scroll arrow, is a small triangle with some lines through it. The apex (point) of this triangle must be pointing up for the sites found to be listed in order of likelihood from most likely to least likely (or A thru Z, 1 . . .9, etc.) If you accidentally click on this triangle, or arrowhead, it will reverse itself and appear with the apex of the triangle pointing down. It will then list the sites found in reverse order, with the least likely at the top of the list (or from Z thru A, 9 . . .1, etc.). If you do not see a series of colored relevance bars in the center of your sites found list, look at that triangle. You have probably clicked it by mistake when aiming for the upper scroll arrow just below it. Just click it again to reverse it, and your sites found list will revert to the normal A to Z priority order, and the priority bar graphs will reappear. By the way, just above the bar graphs is a listing of how many sites Sherlock has found that match your search criteria. To go to any of the sites found, just click on the name of the site in the list on the left hand side of the window. This will cause a description of the site contents to appear in the lower window pane, along with a colored (usually blue) link to the site. Click on the colored ‘link’ and you will be taken to the website selected. Sherlock remains open and retains the list of sites found while you are browsing the website, so you can go back to Sherlock and try another site at any time. Just ‘roll up’ the browser window by clicking the ‘windowblind’ box in the extreme upper right corner of the window, and there is Sherlock, patiently waiting for you to try another site from the list. You can also re-open Sherlock by going to the Apple menu and selecting Sherlock from there, or to the Menu Bar Sherlock Icon if you have installed it. If you want to change or modify the search criteria - for example, to make it more or less specific by adding or deleting keywords - just click the closebox on the ‘sites found’ window, and the ‘search’ window will reappear behind it. For example, if my search for the “Energia rocket” had failed to turn up any listings, or had turned up too many listings, I could have narrowed the search criteria by making it more specific by adding words [“search for Energia rocket with Buran space shuttle”] or widened the search by making it more general [“Soviet rocket boosters including the Energia rocket booster”]. Creating and using the “Find by Content” index. The center tab on the Sherlock finder window is labeled “Find by Content”. This is the option you use to find that long lost document or letter you filed away somewhere, but can’t remember where. You can also use this feature to find almost anything if you can think of a keyword that probably would be specific to it. For example, if you wanted to the find the game Myst, is it a safe bet that not much on the Hard Disk has the word “Myst“ in it except that game, and it’s related folders and aliases. So you would type “Myst“ into the search window of the Find by Content window, and then hit ‘Find’. Sherlock permits you to either search all mounted volumes (Disks), or to direct your search to specific disks (or partitions of your Hard Disk, if you have partitioned it). Just click once on the Disk you wish to search in the ‘Search by Content’ window to select it, and then click the ‘Find’ button. So to find that letter to Mom that you know is on your Hard Disk in a folder somewhere, type “Mom” into the ‘search for’ window, select the Hard Disk to search, and Sherlock will search through all the folders on your Hard Disk looking for the keyword “Mom”. Since there may be a lot of documents with the word “Mom” in them, you might remember that you probably also asked how her cat, Furball, was. So type “Mom, Furball” in and Sherlock will priorize documents that mention both names in them. Sherlock will then open a new window, similar to that which I just described for the Internet search, showing the items found containing your search words in the upper window pane. This upper window pane lists the Names, Relevance (number of times some or all of the keywords appear), Kind (for example, AppleWorks Document), Date Modified, and file Size (e..g: 13 k, 1.2 MB, etc.). Just as with the Internet search, click on one of the names, and in the lower window pane, a series of folders will appear stepping down diagonally to the right showing where the document is located on the Hard Disk. For example, my test search for “Mom, Dad” turned up over 100 items, most of which were AppleWorks or Cardshop stationary or templates, but a few of which were documents or letters I had written to them. When I click on one of the documents, the lower window pane then shows the path to the original document: (Hard Disk>Documents folder>Family Stuff>Friends and Family letters> Letter to Mom & Dad June 1997). You can take a shortcut to the document by simply double clicking the Name in the upper window pane, or the document in the lower window pane, and Sherlock will open the Document (or photo, application program, or whatever it was you were looking for) for you. However, before you do that, make a note of where the document is located on the Hard Disk, and the path to it, for future reference. IMPORTANT Sherlock cannot do a ‘Find by Content” search until you have “Indexed” your Hard Disk, or whatever volume you want searched. (Could be a CD, Zip disk, or whatever). To “Index” a volume, select the “Index Volumes” button on the bottom left of the Sherlock ”Find by Content” window. This will cause a new window to open titled “Index volumes”. This window lists all mounted volumes, and you can choose to index all of them, or select particular volumes (Disks) to index. You can also set a time to have Sherlock periodically automatically update the index whenever the computer is on at that time. To start, select a volume to index by clicking on it’s name to highlight (select) it. This will cause the option buttons which were greyed out at the bottom of the window to become active. Clicking on one of these buttons will cause Sherlock to “Create an Index” (if you have not already done so), “Update an Index” (If one already exists), ”Delete an (existing) Index”, or “Schedule” an automatic update. Clicking the “Schedule” button will open a dialogue box enabling you to choose one or more days of the week and a time for updating. I have selected to update every day at 5:30 p.m., so if the computer happens to be on at 5:30, (around dinnertime), it will update the index while I am probably having dinner and not using the computer anyway. Updating happens as a background application, so you can continue to use the computer while Sherlock is creating or updating the Index, but it will slow down more demanding applications such as Internet browsing or Photo editing. The initial Indexing will take some time (probably about half an hour per Gigabyte), so you might want to direct Sherlock to create the index immediately before you are going to go watch your favorite TV program, or have dinner, or whatever. Incidentally, the Index takes up a fair amount of Hard Disk space: about 15 MB per Gigabyte of indexed material. So if you are short of Hard Disk space, you might not want to create an Index, or you might choose to only index one partition of a volume. Using the “Find File” feature. The left hand tab on Sherlock’s find window is labeled “Find File”, and replaces the old search engine of the same name on pre OS 8.5 Macintosh operating systems. It does exactly what it sounds like it would do: it finds files (folders) on your Hard Disk. For example, maybe you know there is a Quicken file containing your financial information, but where is it? Sherlock will find it for you if you know the name. The Find File window allows you to set various criteria for the search, and also to choose where to search. The first option is where to search. Clicking the double arrow will open up a list including the Finder and all mounted volumes (disks). Select a disk to search from the list. Next, click the double arrow on the left choices list to choose a type of search criteria. A list will open up enabling you to search by Name, Kind, Size, Date Created or Modified, Label, etc. The right choices list gives you options such as: Contains, Does not Contain, Starts with, Ends with, Is or Is Not, etc. To the right of the search criteria you type in the description you are looking for (or excluding). For example, you could choose to search Partition 1 on the Hard Disk for a file whose (Kind) (Is) “Quicken Data” if you are looking for your Quicken Data file. Or, you could choose to search for a file whose (Name) (Contains) ”Quicken”. You can also use dates as a criteria. If you can’t remember what you called the file, but you know you created it in June 1997, you could set the search criteria to find all files whose (Creation Date) (Is) June, 1997, or more generally, if you’re not sure what month, just 1997. You can also add more choices by clicking the “More Choices“ button on the bottom left of the window. This will create another set of criteria which can widen or narrow the search. For instance, you could take two of the above criteria and have Sherlock search for files whose (Name) (Is) “Quicken Data”, and whose (Creation Date) is “1997”. You can add as many choices as necessary to zero in on a particular file, depending on what you know about it. Once you have set your search criteria, click the “Find” button, and a new window will open up to display the results of the search. As with the “Search By Content” described above, clicking on any of the choices will cause the lower window pane to display the path to the file (or folder). Double clicking on the item in either the upper or lower window pane will open the file. For example, my search for the Quicken Data file showed it to be on Hard Disk partition 1, in the Applications folder, in the Financial and Taxes folder, in the Quicken Deluxe 98 folder, and to be named “Terry’s Quicken Data” Obtaining and installing the Sherlock Menu Bar Icon. You can make access to Sherlock much more convenient if you install a nice little Shareware application called “Sherlock Menu”. Sherlock Menu installs a Magnifying Glass icon in the menu bar next to the Menu Bar clock. Clicking on this Icon opens Sherlock, and gives you the choice of going directly to the Find File, Find by Content, or Search Internet tab, or opening up a number of related applications such as the “Baker Street Assistant“ from Casady & Green, or “Moriarity”, two other free downloads which add extra functions to Sherlock. If you pay $5.00 to Public Access Software and Register your copy, you will get some additional functionality for the Sherlock Menu including a Sherlock access icon in your Control Strip - that handy little pull-out tab at the bottom of your screen that you use to change monitor resolution, go offline, change the sound volume, etc. - and the ability to open other applications directly from the Sherlock Icon. Try it out for a while, and if you find it invaluable , as I do, register and send them the $5.00. It’s the right thing to do, and it’s a real bargain. Sherlock Menu is available for download from the “Public Access software” Home Page. The URL for Sherlock Menu is: http://www.pasoftware.com/products/sherlockmenu/index.shtml Baker Street Assistant is Freeware (nothing to pay) from Casady & Green. The URL for Baker Srteet Assistant is: http://www.casadyg.com/downloads/default.html Next month we’ll talk about Control Panels: what they are and how to use them. |