Carnal Reason

One of the often ignored features of OS X Tiger is a powerful search utility call Spotlight. I know I don’t use it much, mostly because I use my Mac for things that don’t require much searching: net surfing, email, blogging, and command line work on remote linux systems. As a result, I have never bothered much with Spotlight, certainly not enough to master the construction of complicated queries.

This is kind of a shame. Abstractly I believe that searching (combined with tagging) is a more powerful and more flexible way to keep track of files than is directory nesting. Witness the success of Google and of del.icio.us. Today I decided to try out a new utility called HoudahSpot. HoudahSpot puts a nice user interface on Spotlight. The infrequent user is enabled to construct complicated boolean queries, to persist those queries, and to see query results in a builtin browser window I found more to my liking than the way OS X presents Spotlight search results.

Disclosure time: MacZot and Houdah are running a special event today. Each blogger who reviews HoudahSpot drops the sale price by five cents. Each blogger gets a free license. When (if) the price reaches zero, Houdah will give away 5000 copies on a first come basis. I have a lot of respect for the many small software developers who create excellent apps for the Mac, so I am happy to help spread the word.

Bottom line: if you are already a Spotlight master, HoudahSpot has little to offer. Less skilled users may find it very useful. I plan to keep HoudahSpot on my machine.

Posted on June 17th, 2006 by pwyll
Filed under: General