May 09, 2008 FoxTrot Professional Search public beta available - download

Introducing FoxTrot Professional Search

18 months in the making, FoxTrot Professional offers knowledge workers the next plateau in find-by-content.

Intensely used in the legal (law firm, courts), media (newsrooms researchers, ad agencies and editors) and mobile contexts (MacBook users carrying reference documents), , FoxTrot offers precision tools for finding the proverbial "needle in a haystack" within PDF, HTML, word processing, e-mail and rich media metadata, including:

+ various categorizations of search results, relevance-ranked

+ document preview and full view, with secondary document-level search

+ multiple indexed collections and timed updates without the application launched

+ client-side access to FoxTrot Professional servers

+ worldwide Unicode language support

A detailed listing of FoxTrot Professional features and differences with FoxTrot Personal Search 2.0 - also announced today - can be found here.


April 14, 2008 PowerMail 5.6.4 brings fixes and enhancements - download
 
What's new in PowerMail 5.6.4: (change list from 5.6.2)

+ Restored compatibility with Mac OS 10.3.9

+ Low-level rebuild was broken after the 5.6.2 porting to XCode 3.0 - fixed

+ Restored the command-key shortcut for hiding the application

What was new in PowerMail 5.6.2: (change list from 5.6.1)

+ Successful porting to XCode 3.0 - while this should be a transparent change, it has three implications for PowerMail users:
    •    Improves our ability to keep up with system changes, especially on Mac OS X 10.5.x (Leopard) and later
    •    Benefits from enhancements in code optimization and acceleration provided by Apple
    •    Produces a significantly smaller binary than 5.6.1

+ Fixed a hang that previously could occur when downloading certain malformed (or should we say malevolently-formed) spam messages, such as have appeared recently
  
+ New version of SpamSieve included in disk image


What was new in PowerMail 5.6.1: (from 5.5.3)

New search features and performance increase (please see full release notes on disk image for syntax examples):

+ Occasional searches on large databases are now much faster, as the index optimization phase is now performed transparently

+ No longer will you see a "Optimizing index" modal dialog at the beginning of a search !

+ Searching using "matches the search pattern" option now supports excluded words inside quoted strings

+ Searching using "matches the search pattern" option now supports exclusion of exact phrases

+ Searching using "matches the search pattern" or "includes at least one of the words" options now allows to combine multiple quoted strings (in addition to multiple simple words) with an OR operator (using the vertical bar | in case of "matches the search pattern")

+ You may now specify words to be found within a given proximity range

+ You can now search exact strings within a given proximity range   

Leopard compatibility

+ On Mac OS X 10.5, scheduled connections could fail if the account's password was saved in the keychain

Fixes and enhancements

+ [5.6.1] Incidental to the above issue, there may have been a crash once after modifying an account's password.

+ The maximum number of messages, during the demo period, has been multiplied five-fold to 1000 messages in order to improve the ability to properly evaluate PowerMail.

+ When the default character set for outgoing message is UTF-8, messages that only contains characters from the ISO-8859-1 charset were sent in UTF-8, instead of ISO-8859-1 as required - this has been fixed.

+ Disk image includes the latest version of SpamSieve

 Known work-arounds [documented as of 5.6.1]

+ The method for accessing passwords stored in keychains had to change for Leopard compatibility, but due to what appears to be an Apple bug, some older passwords may not be found and need to be re-entered once on first usage. Fortunately this is only a one-time event, once the passwords are re-entered, life can go on.

+ If you store your passwords in the keychain, make sure it is unlocked while using PowerMail on Leopard - Apple has changed its security policies and you may now be prompted for a keychain password at every fetch if the keychain is locked (one alternative is to store passwords in PowerMail's settings and not use the keychain for these).

+ On systems with Safari 3 installed, selecting text in an HTML message for copying requires double-clicking on the first word to be selected, then shift-clicking on the last word.
March 17, 2007 FoxTrot Personal Search 1.5 universal released - download

What's new in FoxTrot Personal Search 1.5:

User-experience and functionality enhancements

+ Modernized the user-interface to use the "unified toolbar" appearance in the search window (which is why 1.5 requires Mac OS X 10.4; earlier versions nevertheless remain available for download)

+ Extended the screen real-estate devoted to displaying search results (hint: customize the toolbar to "Show Text Only, Use Small Size" if you wish to gain even more space)

+ Rearranged the header fields in the preview drawer so as to expand the screen real-estate available for previews

+ E-mail messages from CTM's PowerMail application are now displayed with proper header, indicating the sender, recipient and subject

+ The Services menu now allows additional actions to be performed on the selected found files (previously, the Services menu only applied to text selections only)

+ Spotlight comments (as set in the Finder's info window) are now indexed by FoxTrot (you need to rebuild your index to be able to search for existing comments)

+ Added a View menu which allows zooming in and out of documents containing text, i.e. PDF, HTML, Word, RTF and text. In addition, for PDF documents, the following actions are now available from the View menu
    Display Single Page / Facing Pages
    Continuous / Book Mode / Page Breaks
    Media Box / Crop Box / Bleed Box / Trim Box / Art Box
   
+ Added the ability to preview the contents of text clippings

+ Added the ability to preview the contents of webloc files (URLs); when previewed, if the webloc file points to a distant webpage, the preview pane will display it dynamically.

+ Added a new preference to choose between the Open and Reveal in Finder actions within the list of found documents

+ The help menu now provides a new "FoxTrot Search Pattern Help" item, a detailed guide of the advanced syntax for the search strings

Relevance ranking enhancements

+ Implemented a new method to improve the relevance ranking usefulness

+ Proximity ranking could over-rate the rank when a single occurrence of a searched word is near multiple occurrences of another searched word.

Searches excluding literal strings and words

+ Searching now supports exclusion of exact phrases

+ Searching now supports excluded words inside quoted strings

Proximity searches

+ Implemented the search for literal strings in a given proximity range

+ You can now also search words in a given proximity range

OR searches of literal strings

+ Implemented the combination of quoted strings (in addition to single words) using an OR operator (using the | character)

Other improvements and changes

+ The scheduled index update could fail to start at the expected time

+ Added the ability to gracefully quit FoxTrot Personal Search during the first-launch indexing progress dialog

+ To distinguish this application from CTM's future FoxTrot Professional Search product, its full name in the Finder and application title bar has been changed to FoxTrot Personal Search