Spotlaser

Spotlight is the supposedly all-singing-and-dancing desktop search tool from Apple, it is pretty neat and supports a ton of useful things relating to meta data and so forth, I've blogged about it before showing how you can use it on the command line to gain access to these functions.

On the GUI side of things it's a bit crap, you have the top-right spotlight box that you can type into and it features a pretty dismal command language for doing power searches. You can also use Finders tool to do finds using Spotlight, it's OK I guess but not kewl enough to convince me to actually integrate Spotlight into my daily life.

I toyed with writing a GUI frontend to Applescript this last weekend and got pretty far, you could restrict searches, do AND or OR searches, date matches and the like, and it would open the results in the Finder find interface but coding Applescript GUI's doesn't really excite me so I didn't go further with it.

Today over at FreeMacWare.com I saw mention of Spotlaser and it's pretty sweet, its a full frontend to all the features of Spotlight and using it you can really see what is possible, hopefully Apple will soon introduce their own advanced front-end to Spotlight, till then, Spotlaser is the way to go.

Above is a screenshot of it in action, its donationware, so grab a copy now.

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