Product Reviews

Leap is a file search tool for people who have never got along well with the Finder. That's not to say it's a replacement for the Finder - not by a long shot - but it does make finding things easier.

New in version 2 is support for OpenMeta, an open-source standard for adding tags, ratings and other metadata to files in Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6. The main benefit of this is that Leap can now read tags created in other apps that support the standard, and vice versa. Upgrading from Leap 1.x automatically converts any existing tags into this new format, without destroying the old ones.

One consequence of this is that, thanks to OpenMeta, Leap no longer needs to maintain its own tags database. The result

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is a leaner and much faster application.

Leap can perform basic Spotlight searches, but it doesn't have to, and you get better results if you use the built-in 'Go deep' search. Searches are performed as soon as you start typing, which can sometimes slow things down where the search scope is large.

There are occasional stalls as Leap chugs its way through many thousands of files. Some of our searches appeared to have completed with a small number of results, then after a few seconds of inactivity they would suddenly update with hundreds more matches. Another frustrating limitation is that Leap can only display one search at a time. There's no means of opening a second search in another window or a tab.

These annoyances aside, Leap 2 is crammed with bug fixes and useful new features. It now supports the little-known 'WhereFrom' metadata attribute, which links files to the web pages, chat sessions or email messages from which they originated. And despite the occasional lags, it is much faster and more usable than Spotlight.

Although you don't have to have tags and ratings on your files, Leap might encourage you to use them more. It isn't for everyone, but it might well come in very handy if you have a large collection of similar files and the time to tag them.