Review of iPassepartout, review of iSeek

Borrowing from my favorite George Harrison song "Within you and Without You," is very appropriate here while reviewing these two information collecting programs. "Within" here applies to iPassepartout, a program that may very likely replace your use of the Finder's Find (Command-f). "Without" here applies to iSeek: a small program that places a search field in your menu bar, letting you seek from any number of pre-configured web sites (and any other web sites you want to add).

It is an amusing coincidence that both programs have a magnifying lens theme as their icon. However, iPassepartout (pronounced "pass-par-two") is a french word meaning "the universal key that opens all the rooms in a Hotel" uses a double-duty image of the magnifying lens and an old fashion room key. A mixed metaphor that is very appropriate and provides the most significant distinction between what it can do and what your Finder's Find can do.

iPassepartout

Just about everyone has said to themselves something to the effect of, "...that file has got to be on this computer. I called it Report or something like that. I think I wrote it about two years ago. Let me use the Find command and that will find it." So, you do, and you find 230+ documents that have the word "report" in the name. At that point, you are reduced to having to open each document and examine each one to see if that is the one you want.

Or, you use iPassepartout, Softobe's Cocoa application that brings a whole new level to finding things on your hard drive. The only bad news right off is that you cannot start iPassepartout via Command-f. The good news is that you can place it within your Dock. Once you do that, iPassepartout is just a click away.

Using iPassepartout is fairly straight forward. If you know any specific folder your file might be in, you simply drag that folder to the upper field where the folder's Unix pathway is shown. In the second field you place the word(s) you want to look for.

As shown above, the list of files here is shown on the left side of iPassepartout's window, and the content of the file is on the right. One of the options is for the window's split to be top and bottom instead of left and right.

When searching, you can either look for a word in the title of the folder or the file, or you can look within the content of the file(s) to find specific files. If you have more than one word in the "Search Words:" field, the "And" & "Or" fields become active. If you click on the "Expert" word/button, a sheet drops down to provide a whole new list of options for searching. [All check boxes were checked by me as any selection not checked is grayed out and less easy to see--note the "And" & "Or."]

In addition to text files, one can find/watch movies and find/listen to music and sound files. You can see the movie, the text, the image, or the sound (controls) on the opposite side of the files list. However, at least Word 6, FileMaker, FrameMaker, PowerPoint, and MacDraft files were amongst those that I was able to identify who's content are not displayed in the display window.

Just as one can with the Finder's Find, you can double-click on any file and it will open the application (if not already open) and open the document. However, as opposed to the Finder's Find, you do not use a Contextual Menu to reveal the file in the Finder. Rather, you Option-click on the file and the file will be revealed in the Finder.

Softobe claims that iPassepartout is significantly faster than the Finder's Find. This is true. I found searches with iPassepartout in the range of 1/3 to 1/2 the search time than those of the Finder's Find. the longer the search, the greater the savings.

While all this sounds wonderful, there are some problems. First off, about half of my Word files showed up as gibberish instead of the file's text. Also, there is only a vertical slider, no horizontal slider to display the files content. While this is not a big deal for text files as they word-wrap within whatever sized window there is, it is a big deal with graphic files. If you have a file where the bulk of the image is on the right side of the page, you may find you cannot see any of the pertinent part of the image inside iPassepartout's display window. I also noted that non-ascii characters (e.g., curly quotes) are not properly represented in the content window. This is not a big deal as the main intent of the display window is to let you see what's in the file--not reproduce it letter for letter.

I also found searching limitations. When I typed in "report," I was also getting hits on things like "reporter" and "reports" and ended up with 238 hits. But when I typed in "report" and checked "Exact Match," I only got one hit for the one file that was titled "report." Even leaving a space after the word "report " did not resolve the problem.

In short, iPassepartout is a good version 1 for a program like this but it needs some more work. I should be able to find all documents with the word "report" in them and not be looking at "reports," "reporter," "reporters," etc. Also, I shouldn't be looking at gibberish when looking at one Word file while the very next word file shows up fine. Lastly, there should be an option for a horizontal scroll window and/or zooming abilities for looking at images that are too big to fit within the allotted space. While $35 (or $20 for the lite version) is not a tremendous amount of money, it is more than one should pay for the limitations of iPassepartout as it currently stands. As seen on the bottom of this page, I'm giving iPassepartout 3 out of 5 big "A" mostly due to my expectations that the current viewing limitations will be resolved.

iSeek

iSeek is an "Information Seeking Organizer" for finding information on the web. You place the iSeek search field in the menu bar by starting the program. It will remain there in every program even after restarting the computer. I'm not sure how this is done as it is not found in the PreferencePane nor in the Login items. Suffice it to say, it's there.

The size of the field in the menu bar can be adjusted by dragging the little dot just to the left of the iSeek field to the right or left to increase or decrease the size. There is a limit to how far the field can be extended.

Mousing down on the "Q" drops down the menu of web sites that have been preselected by Ambrosia (OK, I placed Applelinks in the Macintosh sub-menu). What this does show is that all these menus can be customized by the user.

Once you have selected your web site for searching, you enter text into the search field as you would in any search field and hit the Enter key. At that point, if you don't have your default browser open, iSeek will open your browser and it will open to the results of your search.

That's it. That's all it does and it does it very well. And, iSeek does it in any program that you are in because iSeek is in the menu bar.

In the above example, I placed a search for "Panther" in Google. You can see it's Google because Google's icon is in the right of the search field. You can see what web site will be searched by the icon. If you click on the icon, the site's search page will open in your default browser.

[If you haven't already, I recommend setting your browser (via the browser's Preferences) to open new requests in a new page and/or tab. That way any new requests do not push the current page off. Yes this does mean multiple pages and/or tabs, but at least you do not lose previous pages.]

I have three complaints/wishes about iSeek.

1. If you have any given web site set in the menu, there is no checkmark on the site in the dropdown menu distinguishing that site as being selected. I would like this option even though the field will give the name of the site when no other text is in the field.
2. The only help provided is Apple's Help Center. It would have been more than sufficient to have a simple TextEdit file explaining the bulk of what iSeek does and how to use it. Such details as adding new web sites and or other fine-tuning could be done using the Help Center, but it would have been nice to also have had a TextEdit overview.
3. There are times where I like using two or more browsers to separate my work and/or activities. I'd like to be able to select which browser that the search opens up in. I'd also like this not as a preconfigured preference, but more as an "on the fly" choice.

As you can see, my complaints are not that extensive.

In short, with the holidays coming up, if you need a quick and simple gift costing about $15, this is a honey. iSeek doesn't do all that much but what it does is very slick and convenient. For anyone who uses the web to do searches for information, iSeek is bound to make life more convenient--and isn't that what it's all about?

iPassepartout review rating

iSeek review rating

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