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Spotlight's biggest shortcomings are its lack of flexibility within searches (I'd love to be able to search - at least more conveniently - within results of an initial search), and I find the search launch as soon as I start typing annoying - especially on my slower machines.
There is no preview of file contents available, and you can't refine your search within results, which is a pain, because Spotlight suffers from a bad Google-esque, "too much information" and "not precise enough information" syndromes - not about the location or contents of files, but the vast number of returns it gives in a typical search. There is no indication of whether a document found in a Spotlight search contains one mention of the word you're looking for or a hundred instances. Spotlight search results are listed and sorted by name, file-type or modification date only. You can do Boolean searches with Spotlight, but the method necessary is not intuitive, and uses somewhat nonstandard syntax with the Tiger version, an issue that has been addressed in Leopard.
Spotlight doesn't support phrase searches, so if that's the key you need to find what you're looking for, you're out of luck - almost. You can muck around with using quotation marks in the search field. I've had indifferent success with that. A simple ‘match this phrase’ configuration button would be so much simpler. And I really am not interested in my desktop search engine doubling as an application launcher. I just want to find the word or phrase I'm looking for in the context I'm seeking.
There are a bunch of third-party Spotlight enhancers and utilities, and I've checked out most of them. They all have their virtues, but involve the extra complication and hassle of running another application. What I want is Spotlight that works the way I want it to work.
Enter SpotInside, a nice little freeware utility that addresses some of Spotlight's deficiencies, and comes closer than anything else I've tried to making Spotlight what it should be. Yes, it's another application to run too, but it starts up almost instantly, adds little system overhead, and has such a well-conceived and convenient interface that it's well worth the minimal extra effort.
Some of Spotinside's advantages over Sporlight and Leopard Quick Look are that you can use the Find panel and select text in your search result, Spotinside highlights your key word(s) in search results, can do sub-searches within results, and it works in OS 10.4 which doesn't support Quick Look. While Spotlight doesn't search as extensive a range of file types as Spotlight ( it doesn't search music files, email messages etc.), that's in some respects a good thing, and for finding words or phrases within text files, PDFs and such it's the best tool I've tried.
Spotinside has been around for some time, and has gone through many developments and changes, even though it's still not reached version 1.0 final status.
One great thing about Spotinside is that your search is not launched until you finish typing your keyword and click the "Search" button. SpotInside searches Microsoft Word, Apple Pages, rtd, rtfd, html, doc, PDF(text), OpenDocument Format(text) documents and perhaps its best feature of all is that it shows a preview the search results contents with keywords highlighted. It will also find the folder the desired document is located in with a click of the "Reveal in Finder" button, and open it with the "Launch" button. There is also a Zoom slider for adjusting the size of the preview contents.
Spotinside since version 8.0.x has had a three-pane user interface. The third pane is a Source and History list, which replaces a slide-out Cocoa drawer in previous versions in which you could add bookmarks to search results you might want to return to.
Actually, there is also a fourth pane of sorts in the form of an extended details option in the top panel that displays your search's Keywords, Scope, Query string, and Format string.
Other features include add folder, smart folder, etc capability in the "Source" pane, and you can now search files from the selected source by text contents.
With version 0.9, SpotInside now includes full fledged tagging feature. Whether you are tagging using TagBot or Punakea or something else, SpotInside can find your tagged files just by adding and selecting tag buttons in the new tag pane. You can add tags to files by dropping them onto the tag pane. See http://bigrobotsoftware.com/ for more information about TagBot.
The downsides of the more recent Spotinside versions are that the interface window is somewhat bigger, complexity is creeping in, and my gut tells me that it's not quite as quick as the older versions were.
In the Spotinside Preferences, you can set the number of returns displayed in the Source pane's History Count, while the Preferences View panel lets you set parameters like horizontal or vertical orientation, a highlight and find by word option, which, when activated, displays the various words and phrases of your search string in color highlights. You can also specify whether to preview PDFs as PDFs or as plain text. By turning "Highlight and find by word" on in the Preferences panel, each word that comprises the query sting is highlighted and revealed by pressing ?G. For example, when searching "Abc Def", the words "abc" and "def" are highlighted in different colors respectively
So what's not to like about Spotinside? In a word: instability. This program is as buggy as a garbage truck on July afternoon. It frequently locks up, requiring the Force Quit command. Still, Spotinside is so good at what it does that I keep using it. No other desktop search engine has the ability to zero in on just what I'm looking for as efficiently and quickly as Spotinside, and I look forward to the day when it will do that without crashing so often.
If you would like a somewhat more flexible and versatile Spotlight-type function, Spotinside is well worth checking out.
System requirements:
Mac OS X 10.4 or later.
System Support:
PPC/Intel
Free
For more information, visit:
http://www.oneriver.jp/SpotInside/index_e.html
Charles W. Moore
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