If you're like me, some of your information is in the cloud and some is on your machine, and you don't always remember what is where. That can make it frustrating when you try to use your favorite local search tool to find something. Isn't the whole point of search that you don't have to remember where you put things?

That's where Precipitate comes in. After you install Precipitate, you can use Spotlight to find files online (such as those in your Google Docs list) just as you would find files stored on your Mac. Then, you can open them in your browser with a single click. Once Precipitate is set up, it stays out of your way, regularly getting the latest contents of your documents automatically, so you'll never need to think about it — and if you have Lion or Mountain Lion with iCloud enabled, then you are truly on your your way to being fully organized!

Change the default save location in Mountain Lion

The default save location for TextEdit (and other apps that can store documents on iCloud) is iCloud. It takes a few clicks if you want to expand the save dialog and save a file locally. There is no way to change this in the GUI, but if you run the following command in Terminal, this will set the default save location to On My Mac for all iCloud-compatible apps:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSDocumentSaveNewDocumentsToCloud -bool false

To change this back to the default, run this command: 

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSDocumentSaveNewDocumentsToCloud -bool true

Update: you can also accomplish this through the Secrets preference pane

Click here to download the preference pane