News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

March 2, 2007

software

Spotlaser focuses your searching like, dare I say, a laser

Posted Mar. 2, ’07, 8:26 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Software

SpotlaserBack in those heady days when Tiger had just been announced, I was all atwitter with the potential of Spotlight. Now, here we are in 2007 and nine times out of ten when I open the Spotlight menu it’s the result of an accidental key press and I end up cursing in frustration.

But nothing shows off the Spotlight’s interface shortcomings better than the sheer number of third-party accessories designed to unlock its full potential. To the group, which currently includes MoRU and NotLight, we now also have Spotlaser.

Spotlaser is a donationware app that makes it easy to build complex queries and submit them to Spotlight. Want to specify a location, a date or range of dates, file type, file size, etc? No problem. Want to just run a quick size for a file by name? Just use the Spotlaser field at the top of the window. It’s also a snap to choose whether you want to search the file names, content, or metadata, and Spotlaser also supports Boolean operators like AND and OR.

We’ve been promised some improvements to Spotlight in Leopard and I hope that they finally enable the search functionality to reach the heights of which I’d previously dreamed.

[via Lifehacker]


1 Comments

Vaska said:

I'm not a big fan of the Spotlight menu item, either, but that isn't Spotlight. Spotlight sits in the back, mocking us with a huge pile of options we can't access from the normal UI (though a lot of them can be found in Finder's command-f). These Spotlight frontend apps don't supplant it, they just make it cough up the goods.

March 2, 2007 8:53 AM

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