14 DAY TRIAL // There are numerous applications (some of which are included right into the operating system) created to ease the life of computer users when it comes to searching for files. However, there are some faster standalone programs, which provide additional features, and one of them is Found.
Found is a lightweight utility available for free in the Mac App Store. It allows you to find files and folders stored on your Mac or on various online file storage services. It can be accessed at any time by double clicking the CTRL button.
At any time, you can use this application to quickly and effortlessly find the apps/files you need, but it's really useful when OS X' Spotlight search is slow or when you want to find files stored in the cloud using Dropbox, SkyDrive or other cloud-based hosting services.
The Looks
Found's interface can be accessed via the menu bar item or the selected global keyboard shortcut. The application is designed to stay out of your way while working and you can swiftly access it again whenever you need to.
We think that having a window which doesn't stay on top of others while you work on your projects is a great feature. Found's window can be summoned whenever you need to find a file and it can easily be hidden if you click anywhere else on your Mac's desktop.
The Works
Working with Found is very easy: you need to press the CTRL key two times and write the name of the file you are looking for. Results are displayed almost instantly, thus proving to be a superior choice when compared to Spotlight, which felt a little sluggish.
Found does take a little time to index all your folders, depending on their size. We had to wait a couple of minutes before being able to gain access to all selected files and start a search.
After writing the filename in the search window, you will immediately see a list with all the files found by the application. They are sorted based on the last access date, and you can even preview them. When the file can't be previewed, the application automatically displays a default icon, based on the file's category.
As far as we can tell, the preview function provided by the application seems to support only a limited number of image formats, pdf, plist, xml and text files. The application also previews videos, however there are some issues with avi files, which can't be displayed correctly.
Found enables you to search any of your Dropbox, SkyDrive, Evernote, Google Drive and Gmail accounts and, from what we've been able to see while testing it, Found seems perfectly integrated with all these services. You need to log in to each one of them from the Sources tab, which can be found in the Preferences window. All cloud data available on the storage services mentioned above needs to be indexed, just like local data.
There are multiple hotkeys you can use to activate Found, such as double tapping the Option key, Ctrl, Command or Shift, among others. Because it's a global hotkey, you will be able to use it even while playing games or watching a movie in fullscreen mode.
During our tests, Found required 50-60 MB of RAM and used 0.1- 0.3% of the total CPU. It was also very stable and didn't crash. However, the initial indexing process requires a lot of disk access and can slow down systems with lower specifications. If you have such a Mac, you should only index your most important folders. On the other hand, when being used on systems with higher specifications, the indexing process will barely be noticed.
Furthermore, the fact that you can drag and drop files from the results panel to your Desktop, onto a Mail composition window or virtually to any window on your Mac's desktop, might be Found's most useful feature, especially if you want to rapidly send a copy of the file to one of your friends.
You can uninstall the application right from the General Settings tab (found in the Preferences window). This will remove the login item, all your accounts' information, the cache data and indexes, but it won't delete Found from the /Applications folder; therefore, you'll have to remove the app manually.
The Good
We were quite impressed by this little app's capabilities: it can be used to search for any file type, be it stored on your Mac or using a cloud-based storage service of your choice.
The Bad
Unfortunately, the application doesn't handle Spotlight's search syntax (you can't use parameters like “kind:” or “date:”). It doesn't search for tags either, all it does is find files based on parts of the file's name.
The Truth
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
