| [ANN] FoxTrot Search products version 7.5 (7.5.4) released [message #1614] |
Mon, 23 January 2023 12:08 |
CTM info
Messages: 170
Registered: September 2009
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Senior Member |
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The Foxtrot Search suite, highly appreciated by knowledge professionals in many realms, is now available in a major new release. Announcing version 7.5 of
- FoxTrot Professional Search for macOS
- FoxTrot Personal Search for macOS
- FoxTrot Search Server for macOS
- FoxTrot Attaché for iOS
FoxTrot Search offers the fastest, most precise and reliable way to find what you are looking for in PDF, word processing, spreadsheets, presentations and 300 other document types indexed on a Mac.
FoxTrot is available for personal use up to 100+ user client-server enterprise solutions. FoxTrot Professional users can have their complete index files with compressed text or actual documents accessible via the iOS FoxTrot Attaché; this offers iPhone or iPad access to gigabytes of reference and personal data on iPhone or iPad. Think of it as instant shirt pocket access to all of your encrypted data.
According to Chantal Favre, senior product manager, “FoxTrot is all about finding,not just searching. Since PowerMail incorporated FoxTrot in 2003 and FoxTrot Personal Search’s 2005 launch, tens of thousands of knowledge workers rely on our extremely flexible tools to get their job done in the legal, media, medical, scientific and academic fields. Searching, finding, discovering and text mining in your heterogenous, small or large document collections has never been more powerful on a Mac or an iOS device.”
FoxTrot version 7.5 offers:
- Spectacular performance improvements, especially on Macs with multi-core processors and SSD drives
- A new approach to finding, focusing more on categorization and less on keywords
- A rewritten date categorizer, plus new filename and visibility categorizers
- An enhanced and cached thumbnail view to provide instant "contact-sheet" type browsing,
- and more than thirty other enhancements since version 6.0
in addition, version 7.5.4 brings:
Miscellaneous improvements
Updated the predefined locations to use the new DropBox folder.
Using the PlainTextFileLimitMB hidden preference also applies to .csv and .tsv files; and to HTML files as well when using Gumbo instead of Spotlight’s HTML importer.
Applying an advanced filter for [other metadata] now also includes the parent folder name.
Bug fixes
Some plain text files were not displayed in the preview pane, when using FoxTrot’s built-in extractor instead of Spotlight’s plain text importer.
The PlainTextFileLimitMB hidden preference could have no effect in version 7.5.2 and 7.5.3.
Version 7.5.3:
Miscellaneous improvements
Added a built-in extractor to access Thunderbird’s (tested as of version 102.5) Spotlight cache.
Added predefined locations for indexing Thunderbird’s data if it had been used and configured in settings to make its data available for Spotlight, or to store messages as individual files.
Improved previewing Mozilla Thunderbird email messages.
Added a hidden preference (UseFullPathForParentFolder) to index the full path of the parent folder (instead of its name) in the “other metadata” field.
Some icons used in the login dialog have been improved for dark mode.
Bug fixes
Corrected a bug which prevented the indexing of PowerMail caches unless the PowerMail importer had been manually extracted from the application and placed in /Library/Spotlight.
Fixed a possible crash when launching FoxTrot.
The FoxTrot system menu could use incorrect colors when toggling dark mode.
Corrected the the “Force-quit agents, and send report to CTM” functionality, when launching FoxTrot while pressing the command and option keys.
Removing folders from the “skipping these subfolders” list had no effect; corrected.
Fixed an inconsistency when using the “UseRelativePathForParentFolder” hidden preference.
Version 7.5.2
Miscellaneous improvements
On macOS 13 Ventura, improves how FoxTrot prompts the user to enable FoxTrot Full Disk Access.
Improved the display of certain document types using legacy third-party Quick Look plugins.
File types for which no Spotlight metadata importer is installed, but for which an application properly defines a Uniform Type Identifier, are no longer categorized as “other documents”; for example, .mkv files should now be categorized as “Video”.
Added information about the Uniform Type Identfiers of indexed documents in the crawler log file.
When re-enbling Spotlight from FoxTrot's preferences, delete any .metadata_never_index and .metadata_never_index_unless_rootfs flag files on the volume's root folder.
Bug fixes
Type-completion suggestions did not work in non-latin languages such as Arabic.
Fixed some situations where macOS would report that the qlmanage process has crashed while displaying some found document types.
An exception could be displayed - or an incorrect highlighting of words could occur - upon displaying a PDF document containing invalid Unicode characters.
Fixed a crash with some third-party touch bar extensions.
Fixed some issues when buying FoxTrot using a recommendation code.
Fixed: when multiple colored Finder tags are assigned to a file, a single color badge was displayed in FoxTrot’s result list. (requires rebuilding the index)
Version 7.5.1
Miscellaneous improvements
When the “by location” categorizer (categorize by path) was used in “view as columns” mode, there was no tooltip shown upon hovering over a truncated path; and truncated paths were incorrectly displayed, with no “…” indicator.
File types for which no Spotlight metadata importer is installed, but for which an application properly defines a Uniform Type Identifier, are no longer categorized as “other documents”; for example, .mkv files should now be categorized as “Video”.
Searching did not work correctly when the search sources list was collapsed (i.e. when the “My Computer” disclosure triangle is toggled off).
Document excerpts are now more relevant, as their length is adjusted according to the layout of the search results list. Hidden preferences have been added to further control their length.
When indexing takes a very long time, a message window is displayed to suggest reading our FAQ; in case the user is not in front of his Mac, the estimated remaining time is now updated in this message window, and it is dismissed when indexing is eventually finished.
Bug fixes
Fixed a possible crash in the “Recommend FoxTrot” window, when closing the window immediately.
Fixed a rare crash when displaying PDF documents that contain invalid Unicode characters.
Version 7.5
New search features
Added a new Spotlight attributes filter, to support any textual, numeric, boolean or date Spotlight attribute, in addition to the predefined set of Spotlight attributes that FoxTrot already supports.
Display the value of the filtered Spotlight attribute, in the excerpts column, when using [then filter by Spotlight attribute].
Display the list of Spotlight attributes of the selected file in the preview header.
Spotlight attributes specified as file system extended attributes (as opposed to being part of a file’s content) are now also indexed by FoxTrot.
Indexing improvements
You can now choose to use an alternative to Spotlight's importer to process HTML files, email messages and plain text files, from the FoxTot First Aid window (which is shown when FoxTrot is launched while pressing the command and option keys).
Added a contextual menu item to specify whether to use Xpdf or Spotlight’s metadata importer, to parse specific PDF documents.
Added a command line to specify whether to use Gumbo or Spotlight’s metadata importer, to parse specific HTML documents.
When indexing PDF documents, words hyphenated across two lines (or across two pages) are now de-hyphenated.
Added a hidden preference to index the file’s relative path instead of its parent folder name.
User interface improvements
Improved the display of email headers (Subject, From, To, Date) on macOS 11 Big Sur and later (as FoxTrot can no longer use Mail.app’s native viewer).
Added “go to previous / next file” menu items, to allow navigating more easily using the keyboard.
The “reveal in Finder” contextual menu was empty for files that have been deleted, renamed or moved, instead of showing their original location.
Other improvements
Improved progress information when syncing an index to FoxTrot Attaché.
Improved upload to FoxTrot Attaché when using a shell script or an AppleScript.
Upload to FoxTrot Attaché now supports SFTP, if you manually install an SSH key and use the built-in shell script.
Added a Services menu item to search a specific folder from the Finder’s contextual menu.
Added a Services menu item to update a specific folder from the Finder’s contextual menu.
When dragging a folder from the Finder to FoxTrot’s Dock icon, you are now prompted for either searching this folder, or updating it in the index.
Bug fixes
Fixed a bug when using the | operator with a quoted string (for example: ["new york" | newyork] did not find any document).
When toolbar buttons are displayed with text labels, the label could appear disabled when the button is enabled, and vice versa.
Search history could miss recent searches, in case FoxTrot crashed or was forced to quit.
Improved the drawing of certain file thumbnails.
When using the PlainTextPreferredEncodings hidden preference to index plain text files using some legacy character set encodings, these files are now displayed correctly in FoxTrot’s preview.
Fixed an exception that could occur when using Quick Look.
FoxTrot Search 7.5 for macOS products (7.5.4) are available in unrestricted, free evaluation for 30 days.
For additional information, kindly visit foxtrot-search.com
Chantal Favre
Senior product manager
FoxTrot Search / CTM Development
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