Palm Converter for OS X and JFile Companion

MacInTouch Home Page: "... Palm Converter 2.0.0a1 is an application that can read some of the files created on a Palm and transferred to your desktop when you HotSync, including MemoDB, Memo32DB, MobileDB, and other database files. This alpha release is a complete rewrite of the program to allow for expansion of translators. It also now exports to XML and exports ThoughtManager outlines to OPML. Palm Converter is free for Mac OS X and Mac OS 9."

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This site also offers JFile Companion, a Mac product for manipulating PalmOS JFile databases.

Copernic/AOL: current leader in the sponsored (freebie) Windows desktop search race

Copernic Desktop Search - The Search Engine for Your PC

Updated 1/5/05 with, unsurprisingly, some more of the negatives.
Update 5/10/05: I think Yahoo Desktop Search (X1 freebie) is the best PC desktop search tool -- except it doesn't index Eudora. X1 commercial does -- for $80. There was rumor of a Google Desktop Search plugin, but it's not there yet. So, for home, where I use Eudora still on my PC, I'm going to try Copernic 1.5 again.

Introduction

I really like Lookout for searching and managing Outlook. I'm sticking with that one for now. I tried Google desktop search and a few others, including Lookout's desktop search -- didn't like 'em.

Since MSN search uses Microsoft's built-in indexing, which I don't like, I haven't tried it.

I think Yahoo/X1 will be interesting, but it's not a freebie yet.

Copernic/AOL is my latest. It looks good at first glance, but it has some fundamental deficits.

Some key features:

1. You can configure location of the indices. I store them in a folder that I exclude from backup, including backup via ConnectedTLM. You really don't want to backup search indices. All my various search indices tools store files in this folder.
2. You can control readily what folders are indexed. I turned off Outlook search since I use Lookout.
3. It indexes PDF.
4. You can tell it not to index very large files.
5. You can control when it builds the indices, including time of day scheduling. It will do low level background indexing (not a default). Index builds seem very fast and "smart".
6. If you map a network share to a drive letter, it appears that it can index that drive. (Performance may be poor, I haven't pursued this capability as I don't need it at work.)
7. It indexes folder names. (A major flaw in Lookout 1.2's file system search.)

Some fundamental defects:

1. It's "stupid" in how it does search rankings. In particular it doesn't use NTFS file metadata it doesn't weight metadata >> folder name >> file name >> document content and it doesn't differentially weight aspects of documents (titles, early text, etc) .
   (One of the reasons Lookout works so well for email search is that there's so much reich metadata available in Outlook. The typical PC document filestore has very little metadata. I'm very interested in the 2005 OS X Tiger search because of the way it uses metadata.)
   
2. It doesn't return a folder or directory as a search result. The only search results are files. This throws away a lot of the intelligence and metadata that may exist in a file store.
   
3. You can't search within a result set easily.
4. You can't sort result sets by metadata (file size, type, date created, date modified, etc).
5. The Help and Submit Bug buttons are broken. There's no documentation.
   

My configuration

1. Limited search to My Documents folder only. (Removed all other folders, for non-removables set to ignore via "modify" button.)
2. Moved indices to my "Cache" folder (no backup).
3. Update index daily at 1am.
4. Max file size to index 10MB (I may shrink this further)
5. Various other small tweaks to enhance performance.

Conclusion

It's the best of a bad bunch, but I'm not impressed. I'll compare it to X1 when Yahoo launches it. For now I'm staying with Copernic (it beats Google Desktop!) but I still get more value from a directory string search I hacked together that emulates the immensely underappreciated Norton Change Directory feature of Norton Commander and Norton Utilities @ 1989.

macosxhints - Using PDF Services for OS X: update

macosxhints - Using PDF Services, revisited

macosxhints - Create a zip archive via OS X keyboard shortcut

macosxhints - Create a zip archive via a keyboard shortcut

Rather neat use of little known featurs of OS X.

macosxhints - How to work with MHTML files (IE Web Archive)

macosxhints - How to work with MHTML files

Microsoft's MHTML is a net standard -- RFC 2557. I wish Firefox & Safari supported it natively. Oddly enough GraphicConverter is suposed to add translation support for it.

Size matters -- but not megapixels

Digital Sensor Size

Since all three of these cameras are nominal '3MP' cameras, we can predict that results from the D30 will be better than those from the Coolpix 995, which will in turn be better than those from the Xi, assuming we use a lens of the same optical quality on each camera.

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For the same megapixels and lens quality, a larger sensor gives a much better print. The author doesn't mention light sensitivity, but I believe the larger sensors (esp. CMOS) also capture more light.

That should be our plea to camera vendors. Keep your $#@ megapixels (6 is enough). Give us bigger sensors and better light sensitivity (ISO 800 equivalent with low noise).

Copernic Desktop Search - AOL's pending solution

Copernic Desktop Search - The Search Engine for Your PC

This has gotten some good reviews. It covers a lot of file types, and one can specify the location of the index files (you don't want to back these up, so they should be stored in a folder that's excluded from backup).

It does not index Eudora data - only Outlook. I can't tell if it supports indexing of a network drive, probably not.

Yahoo is partnering with X1. At the moment X1 and Copernic may be in the lead, with MSN next and Google lagging. Google has to get in gear.

I'll probably opt for X1/Yahoo eventually, but I'd like to see Google improve.