Fat Cat Software » Freeware http://www.fatcatsoftware.com/blog Brian Webster's blog, focusing on his Fat Cat Software products and OS X development Sat, 24 Apr 2010 00:56:57 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 Spotlight Browser http://www.fatcatsoftware.com/blog/2007/spotlight-browser http://www.fatcatsoftware.com/blog/2007/spotlight-browser#comments Mon, 02 Jul 2007 00:51:00 +0000 Brian Webster http://www.fatcatsoftware.com/blog/2007/spotlight-browser 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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