Retrieving string entered in spotlight and showing the calculated result in the list of spotlight results

[Decoder]

Hi All,

We have a very nice feature in Mac OS X, whenever we type any
expression such as: 35 + 36, in spotlight, it shows: Calculator -
<calculator app icon> - 71 in the result list.

It seems like whatever user is typing as an expression in spotlight,
calculator application is taking it as input and showing the
calculated value in result list.

I want to make a sample application behaving in the same way, and when
I did some searching on net, I found couple of keywords such as-
spotlight API, spotlight plugin, but I am not sure if any of these is
going to serve the intended purpose.

Can anyone direct me towards right direction?

Thanks

[Daniel Stine]

"Spotlight plugin" is probably referring to mdimporters, the bundles you use to help Spotlight index your files. Spotlight API may be referring to that, or to the different UIs for displaying Spotlight results. I'm not sure I've ever seen a public UI for adding custom "calculations" to Spotlight, but there very well could be a private API for it.