Spotlaser: Reinterface with Spotlight

Several folks in our most recent Ask TUAW post were complaining about Spotlight's interface, so it's rather serendipitous that today I ran across Spotlaser. This app provides a much more useful search interface to Spotlight by making it easier both to run searches by allowing boolean operators (e.g. AND, OR, NOT), wildcards, and more. And even better, the results are displayed as a Smart Folder in a Finder window (above) rather than Spotlight's default, hard-to-use list. For those of you fed up with trying to use Spotlight, give Spotlaser a whirl and see if it makes your searching go better.

Spotlaser is a free download, but the developer requests donations.

[Via MacApper]

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Source: http://members.optusnet.com.au/frovil/spotlaser.html

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Several folks in our most recent Ask TUAW post were complaining about Spotlight's interface, so it's rather serendipitous that today I ran...

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Pierre Bernard

I guess I should toot my own horn:

I am the developer of HoudahSpot (http://www.houdah.com/houdahSpot). HoudahSpot is a front end to Spotlight that provides enhanced querying power, saved searches, templates, generously sized previews, ...

Give it a try and never look back!

March 03 2007 at 4:00 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Kevin Walzer

An alternative search tool is NameFind, http://www.codebykevin.com/namefind.html, which I develop. It provides a completely different mechanism for file search; I developed this program because I was very frustrated with Spotlight's limitations. NameFind is shareware, but a 30-day demo is available.

March 02 2007 at 4:56 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

gamba

Anyone tried SpotInside?
It lacks simple boolean search integration as in Spotlaser and I just can't find out how to limit search area but the concept is great. Search and view results immediately, sometimes you feel like browsing through some light pre-version of DevonThink.

If they improve PDF display (or at least bring it to anywhere useful) and correct boolean and limited search it could be just the thing to help me through my mess.

You can download it at http://www.oneriver.jp/

March 02 2007 at 5:39 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Super Weiss

Why not change your description of donationware to something that encourages the support of these developers. Your current descript sounds like users are begrudgingly being parted with their cash. With the large TUAW audience it could make a huge difference in the ability of developers to sustain their donationware products.

March 01 2007 at 6:21 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply