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I usually launch programs from Spotlight, and there is one program that I want to launch second process. The program in particular is Mathematica. The second process of Mathematica allows me to keep working on while the first process is tied up to evaluation of some expressions, which take a long time to compute. Furthermore, it is also beneficial that global variables are not shared between two notebooks.
I can launch the first process of Mathematica from Spotlight without a problem. However, when I select Mathematica in Spotlight for the second time, it does not launch the second process. Instead, it focuses on a window of the first Mathematica process. I know I can launch the second process from command line by invoking
/Applications/Mathematica.app/Contents/MacOS/Mathematica
However, I do not want to use command line if possible. I also observe similar behavior in a different program (Adobe Reader), so I guess this is how Spotlight behaves by default. Is there anything that I can do to let Spotlight launch another process of a program instead of focusing on an existing window? If so, how can I do that?
Thank you for your answer. Your solution indeed solve my problem, and I am sure Automator will help me more along the way. Being a recent user of mac at work, it is good to know a new thing about mac. – Seiji Kumagai – 2011-11-15T21:02:13.433
@Skum You're welcome. Automator can be used quite flexibly. It seems to me that I answer half of the OS X question on this site with a short intro to Automator. You can run shell scripts (therefore arbitrary command line programs), AppleScript (including GUI scripting), and a whole lot more, and as applications and services, these scripts are well integrated into and easily accessible from the OS X UI.
– Daniel Beck – 2011-11-15T21:06:53.043