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The Search Bar and Find utility in OS X 10.2 Jaguar are a big improvement over the Find function in clunky old Sherlock II, and more closely approximate the more svelte Find utility in Classic Mac OS versions of yore. Of course the OS X utilities are much more capable than those oldeis in Systems 6 through 8• However, they still have a major shortcoming. I always detested the “Find by Content” feature in the Sherlock search engine. The necessity of indexing the hard drive has always seemed too much of a hassle. It’s slow, the index file burns up hard drive space, it has to be continually updated, and the indexing process slows your machine down. Not only that, but Find by Content only indexes the first two thousand words in each individual file -- not especially helpful for people like me who frequently write articles or want to search resource documents containing 4,000 or 5,000 words or more. Sherlock 2 also only indexes the data fork of files, which makes it useless for searching certain files, such as those created by like eDOC, ScrapIt Pro and NotePad Deluxe which store info in the resource fork. In short, it sucks. No thanks! I have never indexed my own hard drives for Find By Content, and don’t intend to. There are better alternatives. EasyFind 2.6 A freeware contender in search application alternatives to Sherlock is Christian Grunenberg’s EasyFind 2.6, which can search for files, folders or contents in any file without the need for indexing -- and therefore immediately. It supports like case sensitive or insensitive search, boolean operators, wildcards and searching for phrases. In addition, EasyFind uses multithreading and is therefore very responsive even with multiple search processes running, provides contextual menus and Mac OS X services and displays the location of each item in a separate column for a better overview. EasyFind uses little memory, supports drag-and-drop and the clipboard and optionally finds invisible items or items within packages. 
You can select “Destroy” to delete found items (after a warning) immediately or “Move To Trash” to trash them (without a warning). You can also use contextual menus by right-or control-clicking on selected items to perform these actions. EasyFind supports OS X services, making it available from the Services menu in Cocoa applications, and also may be launched from the Finder. According to Christian Grunenberg, EasyFind’s speed compared to Sherlock varies -- the more results you get and the smaller the folders you’re searching in are, the faster EasyFind is (up to 5 times faster than Sherlock). But searching in whole volumes may be about 5 times slower than Sherlock (if the latter is already indexed, and that’s a big “if”), as EasyFind is “really” searching. This is a nice little application, and I’m delighted to have it in my arsenal of tools. It’s main limitation, for my purposes is that its popup menu includes only the mounted volumes and visible folders within the root-directory (“/”) and within your home directory and your favorites, which limits its flexibility in searching particualar folders on other partitions. New in this version: System requirements: Mac OS X 10.2 or newer. For more information, visit: SpeedSearch 2.2 My main hard drive search tool is the wonderful little shareware application, SpeedSearch, which, as its name indicates, is very fast, and which, like EasyFind, happily requires no indexing. It also searches the entire content of all documents in the folders selected. It is very flexible, and supports searching any folder that is dragged to its Start Folder window individually. 
SpeedSearch uses WASTE to display search results. The size of search results is limited only by application memory, and the colors used to display search results are user-configurable. SpeedSearch displays results similar to UNIX grep -- each line that matches the search string is displayed in the results area. And like grep, SpeedSearch supports regular expressions. Features: To use SpeedSearch, select a start folder using the dialog box or drag and drop a folder on the Start Folder icon in the SpeedSearch window and specify the string to search for, then start the search. Any files containing text that match the search string are displayed, along with the lines that matched, in the results area. You can search in either a single folder or in one or more volumes. A Start Folder Favorites popup-menu is located to the right of the Start Folder field. You can set the start folder by selecting an item from this menu. Recently searched folders are placed at the top if this menu. The maximum number of recently searched folders is set in the preferences. Instead of specifying a single start folder, you can also search one or more entire volumes. To specify the volumes, select the “Select Start Volumes…” item in the Search menu. This will bring up a dialog that allows you to specify the volumes to be searched. You specify the string you want to search for in the field labeled “Search For:”. By default, the text is searched for exactly as entered. However, you can have SpeedSearch treat the string as case-insensitive, as a whole word, or as a regular expression. The following criteria can be specified: • Ignore Case Other Items in the SpeedSearch Window include: • Search Nested Folders And that just hits the high spots of what this little application can do. New in version 2.2: SpeedSearch is $10.00 shareware. Registered users of a previous version are entitled to a free upgrade. For more information, visit: Camino Instability From John Dennis I know for me I have had this browser quit a number of times since they changed their name. When I go to download some thing and it opens iGetter then Camino will quit. Since they have changed names the browser is much less stable at least for me on 10.1.5. Maybe they changed some code so it does not run as well on my system any longer. I do not use it any longer because it is so unstable. Hi John; That’s odd. Are you using the 0.7 milestone build, or one of the nightly builds. The Camino folks have affirmed that some of the latest iterations are less than stable. I’ve been running 0.7 intensively for nearly a week, and have had just one unexpected quit. Charles
The OS X Odyssey archives may be accessed here: Note: Letters to Moore's Mailbag may or may not be published at the editor's discretion. Correspondents' email addresses will NOT be published unless the correspondent specifically requests publication. Letters may be edited for length and/or context. Opinions expressed in postings to Moore's MailBag are those of the respective correspondents and not necessarily shared or endorsed by the Editor and/or Applelinks management. If you would prefer that your message not appear in Moore's Mailbag, we would still like to hear from you. Just clearly mark your message "NOT FOR PUBLICATION," and it will not be published. CM
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