Goodness knows Spotlight is powerful enough.

It’s almost too powerful for its own good. For example, it loves to get going as soon as you type in the first few letters of your search, which can be frustrating. And it loves to find everything it can, smothering you in an avalanche of hits from your hard drive.

Productivity takes a hit from the waiting and from the extra sifting of results.

Two apps can help. HoudahSpot helps you to control Spotlight’s power for more focussed searches and Searchlight extends Spotlight’s reach to files on a network’s server.

HoudahSpot: Sharper focus for Spotlight’s muscle

HoudahSpot is a “front-end” for Spotlight. It offers an easy way to create complicated Boolean searches in Spotlight and to restrict results easily to a particular class of object (image, document, PDF, etc).

It comes tooled up with pre-defined templates for “long lost” documents and recent documents, and with hotkeys for saved searches.

The interface consists of a series of familiar fields for constructing your search:

Say, for example, I wanted to find a paper I began two years ago, which seemed like a good idea at the time but ran out of steam unfinished. I know that it was about Tertullian, but I don’t want to wade through the 450+ hits Spotlight will produce by itself.

I remember that it mentions Tertullian and Augustine and that it was a Word Document.

A HoudahSpot search quickly finds the most likely matches and even gives me a preview of the selected one so that I can double-check that it’s right:

HoudahSpot is shareware (USD 14.95) is available from the developer’s web site .

Searchlight: Spotlight searching for servers

Searchlight brings Apple’s Spotlight to the network.

Searchlight brings Spotlight searching to a Mac OS X server, allowing all the clients on the network to search it for files. The recently released version 1.1 also supports SMB, so that Spotlight can also search mounted Windows volumes.

It provides a web interface to its searches, built with Ruby on Rails and accessible to Mac, Windows and Linux users.

Document subscription via RSS keeps users informed when documents change or new ones are created.

Searchlight is shareware (USD 29.90) and is available from the developer’s web site .spotlight, productivity, searches, tips, helpful apps, server, network, not apple mail

The clipboard expender, PopCopy, has been completely rewritten and released as version 2.0.

It is now fully compatible with Microsoft Office’s apps. The app’s rewritten code means that saves and loads more quickly and efficiently.

The Menubar drop-down menu now allows for the deletion of recent clips and offers previews of clipped images.

When activited, the app’s interface now shows three items:

The Preferences screen allows you to set the interface’s hotkey, turn the menubar display on or off and toggle automatic pasting:

PopCopy now also has an industrial-strength nag screen.

Personally, I prefer Jumpcut for greater simplicity, but PopCopy offers support for images which will appeal to some.

PopCopy is shareware (USD 14) and is available from the developer’s web site .popcopy, jumpcut, clipboard extender, helpful apps, productivity, clips

Two new items have been added to the Hawk Wings’ Plugin and Addon List.

Letterbox, which brings the three-paned Outlook or Entourage look to Mail.app’s interface, finds a place in the Added Functionality section.

iSay, an app that records spoken messages which are then packaged up as an attachment to a Mail message, has also been included in the Added Functionality section.

Today Tom Skawski II sent me a list of over 30 typos and stupid mistakes in the text of the Plugin and Addon List. Fixing them was a humbling and salutary experience, which should make the list (now 125+ entries) easier on the eye for readers. Thanks, Tom!plugins, addons, mail.app, apple mail, helpful apps, hacks, voice recording, voicemail

Clipboard extenders, which save your recent clipping and copying history, are a great way to boost your productivity and reduce the amount of switching around you need to do from one window to the next.

JumpCut, CuteClips, CopyPaste+yType all do this job well, as do Quicksilver and Butler which have clipboard or pasteboard histories.

PopCopy takes a slightly different approach. It lives in the Menubar, where it displays the title of the most recent clip.

When you click on the title, it launches a drop-down menu listing all the most recent clips. (The demo is limited to five clips):

However, it can also be activated with a hotkey (Command-Shift-V by default), which produces a pop-up dialog:

Hitting the hotkey again cycles through the list of stored clips, until you find the one you want.

PopCopy is shareware, like CuteClips and CopyPaste, but unlike JumpCut which is freeware. It costs USD 12 and you can get a crippled demo from the developer’s web site .

The developer plans to use any money raised from the app to help finance a trip to Japan to pursue his career as a professional wrestler.clipboard, extender, productivity, menubar, helpful apps

I am a big fan of Services in Mac OS X, especially of the way that they speed me up in Mail and elsewhere.

While plugins already exist to give you access to maps for contacts in your Address Book, today Robert Stainsby released a Service that makes Google Maps and ZoomIn Australia and New Zealand maps available for the text of any address that you select in any app.

Tonight I was reading a PDF about a meeting tomorrow.

With this Service installed, all I had to do was select the text of the address in the PDF, and then select the mapping service from the Services menu:

It switches to my browser and open a map (in this case) from ZoomIn Australia that shows me exactly where I need to go:

Very nifty. I’ll can see myself using this a lot.

MappingService is donation-ware and can be downloaded from Robert’s web site .address book, Google maps, services, productivity, zoomin, maps, where do you want to go today, helpful apps

Peter Maurer’s text snippet manager, Textpander, is my third favourite productivity app after Quicksilver and Spell Catcher X .

I save enormous amounts of time by using it to store my various email signatures (and much more).

Peter sold the app to SmileOnMyMac a few weeks ago where it has now reappeared officially as TextExpander .

The new version (1.3) has gained some new features. You can now reference other snippets as variables via “%snippet:[abbreviation]%” and create snippets directly from selected text by means of the TextExpander Service. An initial Japanese localisation has also been added.

TextExpander is shareware (USD 29.95). SmileOnMyMac is offering free registration to everyone who gave money when the app was donation-ware. If you did, you should be getting an email containing the registration key for the new version.

UPDATE: See how TextExpander ranks among the five apps that most boost my productivity in a post on X Factor .textpander, textexpander, snippets, productivity, helpful apps

Creativebits carries a tip on how to print contacts from Address Book if you need the information and are away from your computer.

Ivan points out that Address Book contains a “Pocket Address Book” printing format.

If you are looking for greater flexibility, it is worth remembering another helpful app that expands your options.

Address Book Reports offers a variety of templates that include Card and Phonebook sizes and well as allowing for custom print-outs (Hipster contact lists, anyone?).

It also does envelopes and labels, and all of that for only USD 15. You can get it from the developer’s web site .

[Via TUAW ]address book, contacts, printing, lists, labels, custom, helpful apps, hipster, productivity