In Accordance, "amplifying" is the term we use for the process of automatically searching for any text you select. For example, if you select the word "earth" in Genesis 1:1 and then choose Holman Dictionary from the English Tools pop-up menu of the Resource palette, the Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary will automatically open to the article on "Earth, Land."
Most of you already know how to amplify to your various Accordance modules, but you may not have realized that you can also amplify to Spotlight or to Google. You can do this simply by using OS X's built in Services.
Services are features of an application which you can access from other applications. You can find all of the services which are available from within Accordance by looking at the Services submenu of the Accordance menu. The two services I want to highlight today are Search with Google (keyboard shortcut shift-command-L) and Spotlight (keyboard shortcut shift-command-F).
The Search with Google service does just what you would expect: launches your default web browser and does a Google search for the selected text. To test it, I selected the name and institution of a former professor of mine who wrote an article in Anchor Bible Dictionary. In seconds, I found a multitude of information about him on the web.
The Spotlight service does a Spotlight search for your selected text, finding any files on your computer's hard drive which contain that text. For example, let's say you're researching some theological concept and you remember that you wrote a paper on it. Select the name of that concept in Accordance and hit shift-command-F to find that paper quickly.
Using these two OS X Services, you can effectively "amplify" to Google and Spotlight.
# posted by David Lang @ 8:05 AM
