FoxTrot Professional Search extends far beyond OS X's buit-in Spotlight, building on years of experience in search functionality refined within CTM's PowerMail and FoxTrot Personal Search products; it includes:
- Multiple categorizations of search results, relevance-ranked
- Document preview and full view, with secondary document-level search
- Multiple indexed collections and timed updates without the application launched
- Client-server access to peer-to-peer and dedicated CTM FoxTrot Search servers
FoxTrot Professional is relevant to anyone with documents saved for future reference; in field testing, the product has been especially well received in legal (law firm and courts), media (newsrooms researchers, ad agencies and editors) and mobile contexts (MacBook users with document collections).
Enhanced search features
- Search string word completion: when typing words in the search field, partial words are autocompleted. Suggestions are based on the content of your index.
- Typo corrections: when searching for a misspelled word, a similar word is suggested.
- Added the ability to search for regular expressions.
- Added the ability to search in the file contents only, ignoring the filenames and other metadata.
- Added "log file", "XML file" and "file archive" types in the "file types" category.
- Added an "all criteria / any criterion (AND / OR)" popup menu when combining multiple criteria.
Expanded document viewing
- Added support for searching and highlighting regular expressions occurrences in all supported document types, including PDF, Word, Pages, Excel etc.
- Added a popup menu in the search field of the document window to toggle between Words, Consecutive Words, Exact String, Regular Expression, or FoxTrot query.
Enhanced indexing
- By default, the content of log files and generic XML files is no longer indexed. This usually enhances the quality and the performance of the index, as these files contain many non relevant data. This can be toggled when adding a custom folder to the list of indexed locations.
- Added the ability to disable some file types for content indexing, when indexing predefined locations, such as Documents or Downloads.
- Outlook 2015, Dropbox and iCloud Drive support
- Added a "view resource hogs" button in the index configuration window; this can help removing from your index huge files that contain few interesting text but many encoded, garbled or numerical data.
- Email messages stored or exported to the .mbox format with a ‘TEXT’ HFS file type are no longer indexed by contents (this would index a bunch of encoded data).
- Contact’s phone numbers are also indexed unformatted (with no space).
- When a third party Spotlight metadata importer has a memory leak, it is now periodically relaunched to prevent using all the available memory.
Bug fixes
- Some files could be displayed using their "title" metadata attribute instead of the filename; some items (email messages...) could be displayed using their (cryptic) filename instead of the title.
- "Update folder in running indices" was updating all files by content, regardless of the index settings.
- When adding a file to the blacklist, or when disabling some file types in the "index contents of files" list, the previously indexed contents of those files was only removed from the index when rebuilding entirely.
- When displaying found words in some PDF documents, the document could be scrolled horizontally excessively.
- Fixed a case where FoxTrot could fail to update the index, after FoxTrot’s preferences have been erased.
- Fixed a bug in FoxTrot’s system menu on OS X 10.8.
- A "can’t connect" error message could happen in some circumstances, and has been fixed.
- FoxTrot’s system menu could appear twice after rebooting.
- A quick test shown no issue on OS X 10.11 El Capitan.
- FoxTrot could be slow to launch when Finder tags are used intensively.
- The diagnostic tool to send a report to the developer has been improved.
