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Review: HoudahSpot 3.0

Review: HoudahSpot 3.0

  • Article 9 of 19
  • MacUser, July 2010

HoudahSpot provides a graphical interface to access Spotlight’s advanced features. Like the Finder’s Smart Folders, HoudahSpot uses pulldown menus to create searches and it can access all the metadata that Spotlight indexes. But it builds on that to allow complex nested ANY/ALL/NONE Boolean searches that can be daisy-chained together and grouped. You can set search locations, exclude locations and limit the results to recently opened, created or modified files. Results can then be filtered by name or path, sorted by more or less any attribute, or browsed using standard Finder technologies such as Coverflow or QuickLook.

To save time when building queries, you can create templates for searches into which you can then enter more specific data, with HoudahSpot coming with several templates including ones for email searches and “long lost” files that haven’t been opened in the last five years. You can also save complete searches and use drag-and-drop from the Finder and search results to add file-type searches.

Version 3.0 of HoudahSpot uses the OpenMeta system to tag files. Any file can be given any number of tags and HoudahSpot can search for files with particular tags. There are a number of applications, such as Default Folder X, that also use the OpenMeta system, so tags created by HoudahSpot can be used in those programs and vice versa. To make it easier to tag files, HoudahSpot now provides a ‘tray’ that acts like the Dock and appears from the side of the screen to give drag-and-drop tagging and access to templates. A menubar item also provides access to HoudahSpot in a similar way to the Spotlight menubar item, while hot keys let you activate the tray, HoudahSpot or the menubar item.

Although its interface does hide some of its more powerful features, making a read of the manual something that power users will want to do to get the most from it, HoudahSpot’s easy to use, faster than Spotlight, and is pretty much the application Apple should have included for advanced searches. The addition of the tray and tagging are extremely useful. Where it has limitations, it’s generally Spotlight that’s the issue rather than HoudahSpot – so the email template won’t work with Entourage emails, only Mail’s, for example. It’s also priced slightly too expensively for the home market, with most people likely to be willing to “make do” with Spotlight. But if advanced file searches are what you want, HoudahSpot is the application for you.

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