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- AppleSearcher
-
- A client for Apple Computer Inc's AppleSearch text retreival
- server. Note: this client software is useless unless you have an
- AppleSearch server on your network. Contact Apple Computer or your
- local reseller for information on AppleSearch.
-
- Introduction
-
- AppleSearch is a full text indexing server. It runs on an
- AppleShare server and you simply drop documents into one of the
- folders it watches and overnight it indexes the text so that clients
- can find things and retrieve them.
-
- The client that comes with AppleSearch is good, but rather "heavy"
- (IMHO). I wanted something that would launch fast, log in
- automatically, and let me do a search as soon as possible.
-
- Using the SDK from the MacOS SDK CD I used the provided library to
- write my own client.
-
- Usage
-
- This program is a bit weird (and I won't do it this way again, I
- promise). Basically when you launch the application it tries to log
- in to the server set in its preference file. When you first run it,
- it will go looking for a non-existant server and will fail.
-
- Go to the preference dialog and browse for your server, enter your
- username and password.
-
- Check the enable AppleSearch checkbox and save the preferences.
- Then quit the program and re-launch it. It should now log in as fast
- as possible.
-
- Next you need to get the source list from the server and add the
- ones you are interested in to the sources popup. Click the "Source:"
- button on the main window and add items from the list. (You must be
- logged in to do this of course).
-
- Choose a source, enter your query, and hit return or enter to do
- your search.
-
- The resulting list has a little bar indicating the strength of the
- match. Double-click a hit to view the text. You can save the found
- text as a BBEdit file or print it. The text window also supports drag
- and drop thanks to the WASTE text engine.
-
- Limitations and workarounds
-
- You can only search one source at a time. (The real client does
- multiples).
-
- If you use multiple AppleSearch servers, you can make extra copies
- of the application (with different names) to connect to different
- servers. The preference file that stores the connection info is named
- after the application name.
-
- If the client gets an error, or the network times out or
- something, recovery is by quitting the application. I know it's not
- great but most of the time it works ok.
-
- Licensing etc
-
- This software is Free and basically unsupported. Go ahead and try
- it out, I (and some of my collegues) use it pretty heavily and it
- seems ok. It is certainly not supported by Apple in any way.
-
- mailto:peter.marks@pobox.com