Mac OS 8 suggested, and Mac OS 8.5 proves, that the millions of dollars Apple poured into Copland—the company’s abandoned 1995 mega-OS project—weren’t spent in vain. With each new release of its OS, Apple plucks more useful body parts off Copland’s corpse. Mac OS 8.5’s striking Find by Content feature (accessed by opening Sherlock and clicking on the Find by Content tab) is one such Copland transplant.
Find by Content lets you go far beyond the traditional Find command (which is still available through Sherlock’s Find File tab). Sherlock can search for the words inside your files and then rank the files in order of relevance—with incredible speed. The search phrase doesn’t even have to be exact. If you type the rain forest problem in Burma, you’ll be shown all documents containing that phrase’s key words, with the documents most likely to be what you’re looking for listed at the top.
But before you can perform such searches, Sherlock must analyze every document on your drives, creating a tightly compressed, invisible, multimegabyte card catalog for itself. The indexing is slow—about two hours the first time you index a normal-size hard drive—and you can’t index hard drives elsewhere on the network or a CD-ROM disc. Fortunately, the indexing can run in the background or automatically at a specified time. (Tip: Don’t miss Sherlock’s easily overlooked Preferences command. For added speed, it lets you omit from the indexing any folders you’ve tagged with a certain Finder label.)
