FoxTrot Personal Search for Mac

User Reviews

• If it worked well, it could be great

  DMV1December 25, 2015

  Pros

  When it's working well, it does amazing search and finds things smoothly that Spotlight has trouble with.

  Cons

  Indexing takes forever iit's now indexing 22,000 files and predicts this will take 9 days - and it's probably correct. When it's indexing, it chews up CPU and slows everything else. It doesn't reliably index overnight, nor in realtime. I'm trying to upgrade to 5.5.3 but when I click "check for updates" it tells me 5.5.1 is the newest version. Which is funny because here on the CNET site it tells me 5.5.3 is the newest version, released 10 days ago.

  Summary

  If they fixed the sloooooowwww intrusive indexing, I would start to use it again. Right now, I've stopped using it and use a Spotlight with Alfred.

  ---

• Contravenes Consumer law in this country under ACL2010

  Ghostly02July 12, 2014

  Pros

  Some functions work.

  Cons

  JUST DO NOT BUY THIS - The Personal version has one purpose only. That is to give a consumer the impression that the Personal Product is a stand alone product and fully functional. It is technically deceptive advertising to provide what appear to be functional processes that have no function other than to throw a Push Promotion for another product.

  Summary

  Here is the latest from CTM: I understand your frustration to see that quite a few features are available in Pro. unfortunately, we have to do things this way, because Foxtrot Personal does not cover its costs and hence is subsidized by the Professional version. It is important to us to have an entry level product because not everyone can afford Pro, but we do need the upgrade revenue to justify having an entry level product. There are two things that can be done. One is that you get used to ignoring the features which are not inherently part of FoxTrot personal. Exceptionally, I can offer a second alternative to you, which is to to offer you a discount on a copy of Pro, which, as you will have understood by now, does bring you much more functionality, instead of the 30% you are entitled to as a personal user. Jean-Michel / CTM qa

  ---

• Very Impressive

  waldorfogFebruary 7, 2013

  Pros

  Fastest indexer out there Easy to use Great for large amount of documents OK Tabs, Bookmarks, Layout

  Cons

  No twitter activity Distant Support Not a very polished UI

  Summary

  Ok.. will start by stating that i have tried every document organizer/manager for mac out there: Devonthink, Eaglefiler, together, Yojimbo.. even Sente, Papers, Bookends and similar research tools. Spent many hours experimenting and looking for the tool to round off my workflow. In terms of indexing speed, which in my case is very important because I use hundreds of thousands of files, non of the above come close to Foxtrot. It is extremely fast. Indices are easy to manage, it has tabs, searches are bookmarked, layout works fine. I could not find a way to edit or add OpenMeta tags which would be nice. UI is not as polished as Devonthink, Together or Papers. I would also like to see it pick up my document's custom icons. Support seems distant and slow and they have only two tweets on their twitter account which is pretty sad considering its value. For this reasons I gave it a 4.5 instead of a 5.

  ---

• One of the best software investments I've made!

  fmedinaeMarch 5, 2012

  Pros

  At work, it has signified for me much less stress to find that letter, that PDF, that report, that email where the information I urgently needed was—having very often someone at the other side of the phone waiting for it. I also use it at home to find that citation I needed among my research papers or OCR scanned documents. I used to have other database applications, more tag orientend, but having to deal with Gigabites of texts, it simply was not the best approach. Now, although I still classify my info in mayor cathegories, I don't spend more time in tagging files, trying to guess when will I need to find them in order to arrange them accordingly. With FoxTrot I can find the context in the document I'm looking for, and not just the file to search in it. And the time scroll also lets me narrow the results, in real time. I also use Yojimbo very much, and it was a so nice surprise to find out that FoxTrot even searches the Yojimbo database without necessarily having it running.

  Cons

  None. I wish I had known it years ago.

  Summary

  I recently have purchased a license of FoxTrot Professional and it's really one of the best software investments I've made. A computer is as powerful as the programms you run in it, and FoxTrot has really empowered me to instantly find the right information. It's excellent!

  ---

• Do you want to save hours and hours of your time?

  rkolle01September 10, 2010

  Pros

  Very easy to use and quite fast scanning. It is waaaaaaaay better than using Google desktop search on my old windows system. Apple should buy the makers of FoxTrot!

  Cons

  As long as you have a good processor and enough memory, you shouldn't have any problems.

  Summary

  I'm a management consultant and spend about half my time in my home office. I used to spend hours and hours looking for a file that I swear that I had on one of my drives, but just could not locate. FoxTrot Personal Search has saved me countless hours of frustration. I strongly recommend this to anyone who is tired of misplacing files and then having that bad feeling when you can't find it.

  ---

• Saved the day...

  ripvw51January 23, 2010

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />This app is awesome. I was on deadline to submit a grant proposal and couldn't for the life of me find a document containing pertinent information. Fortunately for me, I had a trial version of FoxTrot Personal Search (FPS) still active, so I fired it up. Upon first starting the app you are given a choice which folder on your hard drive you want to index. The index building process takes several minutes depending on the number of records it has to process. The index created makes for very fast searches using key word(s). The FPS uses normal boolean logic and wildcards. Well, when I typed in the search box the phrase "united way" that I so desperately needed to find, bam, a list of records (rtf, doc, pdf, etc.) popped up with all occurrences found in the folder selected to index. A separate viewer below this list shows a preview of the record with the phrase "united way" in bold and highlighted. There's also another window on the side that allows you to further drill down. For example, there's a section with a slider you use to narrow the date range to search. A second section shows the location(s) where the records were found (folders and subfolders on your hard drive) and the number of items found containing the key word(s) or phrase. You can also see in a third section the file type found (e.g., pdf, word processor, plain text, mail message, etc.) with the total number found. Within a few seconds I found the phrase I was looking for in a mail message from a colleague. That made my day and allowed me to complete the proposal on time. I immediately and gladly bought a license. There's more power under the hood (in Preferences) where you can add additional folders to include in the index (like User/Library/Mail for email searches), but it's not a good idea to index the entire hard drive because that will increase the size of the index file and slow down searches. Moreover, you can exclude certain folders (like a Backup folder) which will reduce redundancy and speed up the search function. I'm thrilled and highly recommend FPS if you have thousands of documents and/or email messages you need to regularly search for arcane data that you couldn't possibly keep straight in your head.

  ---

• Excellent!

  MacHeadJuly 29, 2008

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />Finally a local search tool that can wade through thousands of documents and provide accurate results with live previews. Even hyperlinks are maintained in HTML docs. Amazingly fast indexing and tons of search features. A little pricey but it is one-of-a-kind.

  ---

• Warning re Entourage Email

  harveymacfixitOctober 4, 2007

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />This product has the speed and control I've been looking for, but, contrary to the advertising, would not find Entourage email documents. Spent hours indexing and reindexing, to no avail; finally, someone suggested that you had to index the metadata in the user/library/caches/metadata/microsoft folder. That worked for while, but lately the product has stopped finding Entourage docs. Too bad - would like to buy the product otherwise and if it worked would be worth the price to me. There is almost no documentation; help file not available (though on the menu).

  ---

• Just Great!

  Richard Gordon--2008July 29, 2007

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />Excellent! Use it all the time! I find spotlight useless for everyday work.

  ---

• Fantastic = Wow!

  sloosley--2008March 31, 2007

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />This is a must have for me. It is simply awesome! Type a few words and it finds and shows you the location in the files. Wow! Got love it. Thank you thank you thank you. -s

  ---

• Show reviewsHide reviews
• Rate it