(SCO transition music)
- [Don] Hi, this is Don McAllister
and welcome to another edition of ScreenCastsONLINE.
This week, it's time to revisit another old faithful app
that we've covered before on ScreenCastsONLINE
and that's HoudahSpot.
Search is critical to the Mac and although Spotlight does
a fantastic job of indexing all your files and folders,
it's really let down by its search capabilities.
HoudahSpot uses the same index as Spotlight
but uses its own optimised user interface
and powerful feature set to make searching much faster
and so much easier.
With the release of HoudahSpot 5, I'm going to take
you through the core features as well as taking a look
at some of the significant new features and improvements
in this essential macOS app.
(SCO transition music)
Although we've covered HoudahSpot before,
I'm going to treat this as a foundation show
so I'm gonna show you the basics
and then some of the more advanced features
so you don't have to go back and have a look
at previous shows.
Now if you do dip into the previous shows,
I'd probably call this HoudahSpot at the time
but I've been since advised that it is HoudahSpot.
So forgive me if I fall back into my old habits
of referring it to HoudahSpot.
But anyway, go across to houdah.com
where you can find the information,
download a free trial.
You can also buy it from here as well.
You won't find the application on the Mac App Store
because it's integration at a system level
but if we just check on the pricing for this now,
it's 32 Great British pounds for a single user licence,
49 pounds for a family licence.
You can buy a site licence as well.
If you're a previous user of HoudahSpot,
you can get a paid upgrade as well;
18 pounds for a single user upgrade
and the family upgrade for 28 pounds.
Let's go ahead and take a look
at the user interface of HoudahSpot.
There are several ways to launch HoudahSpot.
You can launch it from Spotlight, which I will do.
You can also launch it from a HoudahSpot helper
which resides in the menu bar.
We'll take a look at that later.
You can also integrate it into Launcher applications
such as Alfred or LaunchBar but let's just go ahead
and run it directly from Spotlight to begin with
and that takes us into the main HoudahSpot window.
Now, it does look a little bit intimidating
but you can use it very, very simply.
In fact, to do a search, all I would need to do;
let's say I wanted to search for any test files
I have on my system, just type in the word test
up at the top, hit Return or click on this arrow here.
So immediately it's gone away, it's done a search
on the Spotlight index and it's returned 319 files found.
Now, some of these are mail messages,
some will be, well, we have some Markdown documents,
JavaScript scripts, all sorts of different bits of content.
And it's not currently the way it's configured,
just searching for the file name.
It's searching for both the file name
and also any content that has the word test in it as well.
You can control that from here, this dropdown.
So currently, it's looking for any text
so whether it be in the file name or in the content.
If I wanted to just search for the name of the file,
I select that, it goes away, found 91 files this time
and each file name has test in the title
or I could just go ahead and also say text content.
So we have 265 files all with the name test in the content
but not in the file name.
A new feature in HoudahSpot and we're probably running ahead
of ourselves but just to show you the power of this,
if I wanted to see whereabouts in the content
the word test appears, I can go over to here,
pop out the info panel and then there is a feature here
to give me a text preview and basically now,
I can see the contents of the file
that's highlighted which is this one here,
showing me that test appears in the context
of this particular sentence.
I can also pop that out.
So it will fold the text.
So this is the unfolded text.
So I might have had to scroll down if it was down here,
quite a bit to see it but if I just click on here
it will fold the text and just show me
the relevant content contained within the file
but let's go ahead and we'll pop that out of the way.
We'll come back to the info panel shortly.
Let me go back and reset this to any text.
We're back to our 319 files found.
That's just a quick preview
of one of this week's Apple-related tutorials
from ScreenCastsOnline.
ScreenCastsOnline is your premium source
of Apple-related video tutorials.
All of our members get access
to brand new up-to-date tutorials each week
as well as unlimited access
to our entire video archive
full of Mac and iOS-related tutorials.
You can stream and download all of our videos
on your Mac, iPad and iPhone
and even your Apple TV
using the Members Only ScreenCastsOnline Apple TV app.
Membership also includes a complementary subscription
to the digital ScreenCastsOnline monthly magazine
published each month and packed with videos,
articles, reviews as well as hints and tips
covering all aspects of the Mac, iPad, iPhone
and all of the other fantastic Apple products.
So, if you ready to start getting the most
out of your Apple devices,
visit ScreenCastsOnline.com today
and become a ScreenCastsOnline member.