Spotlight, the search tool built into OS X, got a lot smarter in Yosemite – but one developer thinks it could go a whole lot further. He’s developed Flashlight, an app that extends the capabilities of Spotlight to include weather animations and Wolfram Alpha searches.

More interestingly, he’s intending it to act as an unofficial API other developers can use to add functionality to Spotlight …

Developer Nate Parrot says that the software is at a very early stage, but does demonstrate the potential.

Flashlight is an unofficial Spotlight API that allows you to programmatically process queries and add additional results. It’s very rough right now, and a horrendous hack, but a fun proof of concept.

The concept is similar to the popular Alfred app, but with the greater convenience of everything being integrated into Spotlight. It also allows terminal commands to be executed, which is more useful than it sounds as they are executed in the current Finder window, saving a lot of navigating.

As an alpha app at at early stage of development, you may not want to install Flashlight on your daily driver, but if you have a partition or Mac used for experimentation, you can download the app from Github.

If you think you’re not yet getting the most out of Spotlight’s existing capabilities, check out our how-to guide. And if Spotlight seems to be consuming a lot of CPU cycles, it can be tamed.

Via TNW

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