[Ti] Indexing & Folder Action

[Kim Gammelgaard]

On 15-12-04 13:58, "Sambouka" <sambouka at mac.com> wrote:

> Hi there,
> 
> There are two features in OS X that I have always wondered its use.
> What does indexing do? does it help with retrieving faster search
> results? if so, why isnt it an automatic feature in OS X.

Indexing is absolutely marvelous, if you have the need. I have just been in
a working group at work where we were analysing three different larger
software products, each with several hundred pages of documentation. I being
the only one with a Mac in the group took the challenge and gathered all the
documents in a folder on my PB that I indexed. The folder size is 215 MB,
containing 77 files, but that is not only text of course.

After the index was done, I could just use Find in the Finder (cmd-f) to
search that folder (search files in special places whose files contain.. ).

For instance, searching for the term Legacy reveals 24 documents with that
word somewhere in the text.

To be able to find the terms faster, I converted all Word and
Powerpoint-docs into PDF's and then used Previews fantastic indexing
function to find the occurrences inside the documents.

All other group members relied on paper versions, as their PC's simply does
not have this capability to search fast. It was fun to see them carry
plastic bags of paper every time we met, and I just carrying my PowerBook.

Needless to say, my PowerBook and indexing did make a difference :-)
> 
> Another feature is Folder Action, what does this option do? what
> configurations can be done through folder action? does anyone on this
> list use it.

I have only used Folder Actions once, where a client wanted to be able to
work with files saved on the desktop from Mail, and as they somehow are
stored as locked files by default. I think I found a hint on Macosxhints.com
regarding this and just added a Folder Action with an AppleScript to the
Desktop folder of the client, so that any file dropped on it will be
unlocked. Great tool for things like this.

Cheers,

Kim