File Search software – Found App
If you want to find any file on your Mac, then you have tool built-in to Mac OS X, Spotlight. It does a good job, generally and you can find any file Mac style very quickly. There are times when you want to take it a stage further and have a file finder that is a Spotlight alternative. You have the application that is called Houdah spot, which has all sorts of tagging and finding features built into it. Yesterday I came across another application which could be used as a Spotlight alternative and it is called Found. I came across the application called Found at more or less the same time as I discovered Trickster. Both of these applications are located in my menu bar now and provide me with more ways to search for my files.
Tricking out file search software with Found
You start up this Found application by hitting the control key twice in succession. The application pops out as a slider on the left side of your screen and you can type in the search term for whatever you are looking for. Found will search through your files based upon how your files are named. Found does not search through the content, nor does it look at the Meta data, for example the tags you have added. Searching through the content is promised in an updated version and I would hope that searching for files that have been tagged will be added later also.
The Found application on the Mac
One of the best things about Found which makes it better than Mac OS Finder is that it will do a search in the cloud for you. If you have a number of Google accounts for your e-mail and Google Drive, you can get Found to search for your files. Just as you can find any file Mac, with spotlight the file search software, built into Mac OS X, you can find files that are contained within Google drive and also in Gmail.
Within Found you can make a copy of a Google doc or grab a spreadsheet and e-mail it to somebody else. Best of all you don’t have to open up your web browser and login to your Google account to do so. Found the file finder application will index the data in the cloud for you, making it possible to do your searches even if you are off-line.
Found the file Finder Spotlight alternative
Another really good point in favour of Found in comparison to Houdahspot, is that the software is free. It may be that later when there are other capabilities added to the software, such as searching inside the content, that the application may become a paid for application. It does of course depend upon the price and the functionality that gets included, as to whether value is provided and whether you would continue to use it.
A better file finder for your Mac
No file tagging within Found
My favourite application with regards to adding open meta data tagging is Default Folder X. This adds extra to the save dialogues and one of the facilities that is added, is the ability to add tags when saving your documents. Tagging is particularly useful when you are working on a project that spans a number of different file types. This will often make it much easier for finding all files for that project by doing a search for the tag. You can use the tags within Mac OS X Finder directly, or you can use an application like TagIt, another free app, to help you. So tagging would be very useful for working on an eBook project. All of the files from the text document which might have been created in Mou or Byword or perhaps Pages along with all of the media files, such as the drawings and pictures, audio clips or videos.
It seems that there is still no perfect file search software for your Mac, but the application Found is a good addition to the arsenal of Spotlight alternatives. I will be hitting the control key twice quickly, to bring up the application first before I check into Spotlight. Although if it is a file that has been used recently then I may well pick up the app Trickster from the menu bar before I try Found.
