HOW TO | USE SPOTLIGHT’S BEST FEATURES
1 Weather forecasts
Type ‘weather’ and you should get a result under the heading ‘Weather’ and/or ‘Top hits’. Select it to see current conditions and predictions for the next six hours and 10 days. Press ® to visit Weather.com. Add a place to get its forecast; if that doesn’t work, add ‘in’ – ‘weather in Paris’, for example.
2 Sporting event results
Scores for major teams can be searched for. Spotlight mostly covers American sports, such as football and baseball, but the English Premier League and other major football leagues are also available. Type something like ‘Arsenal score’ and you’ll see the most recent result. Scroll down for fixtures.
3 Sports fixtures and line-ups
To see the results of a specific game without looking through the fixtures list, use a term along the lines of ‘Chelsea Everton game’. You can also see a team’s current line-up by using the rather American-sounding ‘roster’. So ‘Liverpool roster’ or ‘Yankees roster’ will list players and their positions.
4 Stocks and shares
Apple seems obsessed with stocks and shares, given that it welds a Stocks app to every iPhone, so someone must find this information useful. If that’s you, type a ticker symbol to see its current price, or type a company’s name followed by ‘stock’. Pressing ® opens the result on Yahoo Finance.
5 Online videos
In theory, Spotlight can find online videos, but right now its capabilities appear limited. Type in a search term and then ‘YouTube’ or ‘Vimeo’ and you might get a result. Press ® to open the result in Safari. We’ve found you need to be quite specific regarding titles – and you only ever get one result.
6 Transit information
At present, transit is disappointingly limited in Apple Maps, and it’s of perhaps limited use in Spotlight anyway, unless you always carry a MacBook. Still, in the UK you can type in a London station to quickly list its connections, see photos of the station, and, bizarrely, see reviews from Yelp.
7 Local venues
Spotlight can dig up other map details. Type ‘Apple Store’ to see your nearest stores under the ‘Maps’ heading. Many other terms are recognised, including pubs, cinemas, shopping, and even types of food, such as ‘Indian’ and ‘fish & chips’. Sometimes adding ‘maps’ brings them to the top.
8 Reopen recent documents
For compatible apps, Spotlight is a speedy way to get at recent documents. Search for one and recent documents will be listed under its icon on the right. Click a document to open it or, if you’re wedded to the keyboard, press † to move the focus to the list, then use the arrow keys and ® .