Spotlight Browser
Posted on July 1, 2007 by Brian Webster
Filed Under Freeware, Development |
In some recent development work, I came to want to be able to easily display the Spotlight metadata for various files in the file system. There is a command line tool, mdls, that lets you do this, but using it was kind of a pain and not very user friendly. There are approximately one kajillion programs out there that do various forms of Spotlight searching, but I couldn’t find one that just listed the metadata for files.
So, I grabbed Apple’s SimpleBrowser example code, made some modifications, and thus was born Spotlight Browser! It’s pretty simple, it just displays a Finder-like column browser at the top of the window that lets you browse through the file system, then displays the metadata value that Spotlight has indexed for the selected file in a table beneath the browser. You can also drag a file onto the window or to the dock icon to make the browser jump to that location.
I figured other people might find this useful and decided to release it, along with the source code as a free download, which you can get here.
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3 Responses to “Spotlight Browser”
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Can I sort film rolls in latest version?
How?
Thanks.
When I tried to run “Spotlight Browser” I got the message:
You cannot open the application “Spotlight Browser” because it is not supported on this system.
I was able to download the source, compile it, and use that version just fine. If you need to know, I am running 10.4.10 on a 933MHz iBook G4
Ah, it looks like the SimpleBrowser project this was based on was old and wasn’t set to do a universal binary on a deployment build. So, the download turned out to be Intel-only, which would explain why it didn’t work on the iBook. I changed the setting, rebuilt it, and replaced the download and the project. Thanks for the heads up!