What's New

BlitzSearch

BlitzSearch lets you start of your search with the same convenience as the standard Spotlight menu. Yet down the road you will find all the power and customizability that exists only in HoudahSpot.

Always-on global menu

The global menu item may now be displayed without HoudahSpot running. This gives you access to the full power of HoudahSpot. Yet you will not have the HoudahSpot icon cluttering your Dock.

Finder toobar item

HoudahSpot may add an icon to the toolbar of Finder windows. With this, searching a specific folder is only a click away.

AppleScript support

You may invoke BlitzSearch using AppleScript:
tell application "HoudahSpot"
blitzSearch “mySearchString” filename yes content yes comments yes
end tell

You may also access search results and current selection using AppleScript:
tell application "HoudahSpot"
set mySelection to selection of first document

repeat with myFile in mySelection
set myName to name of myFile
display dialog myName
end repeat
end tell

Service menu

BlitzSearch is now available from the Services menu in all applications.

Spotlight menu

HoudahSpot 2.1 may work as full replacement for the default Spotlight UI. You will probably want to disable the default Spotlight menu.

Leopard Compatibility

HoudahSpot 2 requires Mac OS X 10.5 and makes use of some of Leopard's unique features.

E.g. HoudahSpot uses Apple's QuickLook technology for brilliant file previews.

All-in-one Interface

Results are shown next to the search query. You may modify the criteria without stopping the running query.

Exclude by Location

Alongside a scope for the search you may define a list of places to ignore. E.g. you could search all of your home folder except for the Library folder.

Limit Output

You may chose to have HoudahSpot show only a limited number of results. E.g. the 100 most recently modified files.

This greatly speeds up queries.

Unlimited Columns

Show and sort by any file attribute you can think of.

Naturally column selection, order as well as sort order are saved to HoudahSpot documents and templates. These are also loaded from the "Preferred Template" in order to create new documents to your liking.

Copy-Paste Support

You may copy from the result list to your favorite text editor or spreadsheet. This is great for further processing of results.

Likewise you may copy attributes from the Inspector window.

Customizable Shortcuts

The global shortcuts for activating HoudahSpot are now customizable.