As a professional writer, I find that one of the most wonderful things about working on a computer is that its ability to almost instantly access stored and archived information -- that is if you can find it.

I estimate that I have some 10,000 columns and news articles of my own archived on my hard drive, as well as perhaps half that many research documents. Retrievability is the problem.

The Mac OS purports to offer a solution to this dilemma with Sherlock 2's "Find By Content" feature. However, in my humble opinion, Sherlock 2's implementation of this potentially valuable ability, in a word, sucks.

Why? because Sherlock 2 demands that before you can search the contents of your files, your hard drive and/or other volumes you might want to search must be indexed -- a process that literally takes hours if you have a substantial number of files, and then this index must be continuously updated to stay current as new material is added to your archives.

Once this lengthy task has been accomplished, Sherlock 2 indeed has some very powerful and fast search capabilities, using either simple, natural language criteria such as specific words or phrases, or the more powerful Boolean logic, with the qualifications or, and, not, adj, W/n, and "wild card" searches.

Back on the downside, Sherlock 2 only indexes the first 2,000 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.

No thanks! I have never indexed my own hard drive for Sherlock, and don't intend to. The whole concept seems clumsy, flawed, and unMac-like. There's gotta be a better way, and happily there is; two better ways in fact that I know of: Patrick Maes' FindText and Matt J. Brunk's SpeedSearch -- both shareware applications that search your files with no necessity of prior indexing.

To comparison test the two text search applications for speed, I did a search for "Steve Jobs" in two the document archive folders on my 233 MHz WallStreet PowerBook's 10.2 gigabyte Toshiba hard drive. One folder is a catch-all for articles and other research resources downloaded from the Web, and contained 1723 files. The second folder was the archive of my columns and feature articles from the year 2000, and contained 419 files.

It to look FindText 30 seconds to sleuth out and display 50 matches in 26 separate files in the large folder. SpeedSearch turned up the same results in 18 seconds, or nearly twice as quickly.

FindText zipped through my articles archive in nine seconds, turning up 25 references to Steve Jobs. However, SpeedSearch performed the same task in an eyeblink three seconds, or three times faster.

However, in practical terms both applications are more than adequately quick, and one wonders why Apple didn't opt for something like this in Sherlock. Having not indexed my hard drive, I couldn't test Sherlock 2 against the two shareware applications for speed but I don't doubt that it would be more than competitively fast, and indeed Patrick Maes is concedes that Sherlock is faster than FindText. However, remember that both FindText and SpeedSearch scanned every word in every file, some of which were substantially larger than Sherlock's 2000 word ceiling.

Summary:

These are both good, well-engineered programs, and either will do a fine job for you. Their respective strongest points are:

FindText

Hot:
• Attractive, Mac-like interface.
• User -friendly and very easy to learn

Not so hot:
• Slower than Speed Search
• Fewer power-user features
• Costs twice as much as SpeedSearch

SpeedSearch

Hot:
• Significantly faster than FindText
• More power-user features
• Costs half as much as FindText

Not so hot:
• Less, attractive, geekier interface
• More complex and less user-friendly

Which one is best for you depends on your priorities. Either one is an excellent choice, and a lot more convenient than Sherlock 2. Both recommended.

For more detail and download links on the programs respectively, click the links below, and don't miss checking out the accompanying NotePad Deluxe review.

FindText 1.3.6

SpeedSearch 2.0

NotePad Deluxe 2.1: A Small But Powerful Text Database And More

Charles W. Moore

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