Sonny Software

I am really using bookends extensively these days - several times every hour. And there is one thing that I am really missing - I have raised this question before, but I thought I would elaborate further. Basically what I would like to see is a better "Find" window that would incorporate the ability to do multi-parameter searches taking info from the bookends library currently open as well as spotlight info of the various attached .pdf files. Let me give an example.

I want to find an article written by alexander betz containing the word pregnancy and foxp3 in the main text. Now doing a normal spotlight search for these various things (alexander AND betz AND pregnancy AND foxp3) will give me way too many results - basically these results will include hits where alexander betz was cited, multiple authors called betz, another called alexander, etc. Using spotlight I have no way to limit this to only author. In bookends however, I can find all the articles written by alexander betz - but now I can't limit this search to articles that would contain the words "pregnancy" and "foxp3".

So a really nice solution would be to incorporate this search function into bookends - and maybe make the spotlight search even more powerful a'la "FoxTrot". A search window representing a search like this could look like:

Alexander Betz [author]
AND
Nature Immunology [journal]
AND
Pregnancy [spotlight]
AND
Foxp3 [spotlight]


I hope you can see what I mean here..... It would make the best scientific program (that is bookends....!) even better! Basically some of the features seen in "Pages" incorporated into Bookends.

Oh ya - one last thing - I am using PahtFinder rather than Apple's Finder, so it would be nice if this search didn't require the Finder to run in the background.....

Cheers,
Kristian

I've been thinking about this. Others have asked for this capability as being available as a smart group.

The main issue I see is speed. Spotlight searches (especially the first one of the day) can take a long time (on a test PPC machine I have, over a minute is not uncommon). This makes it impractical for smart searches. It's possible, however, that having it made part of a standard Find would be OK. I don't know -- what do others think?

BTW, you can do what you want right now pretty easily, in two steps using Live Search:

1. do your Spotlight search for "Foxp3 & pregnancy"
2. switch to "all fields", then do your word search for "alexander betz nature immunology"

Jon
Sonny Software

I don't particularly need smart-searches, so including it as a part of a standard find would be great for me. Another option (which is a bit silly....) would be to make bookends build its own index - similar to what "Foxtrot" does:
(http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/28446)

Thanks for the tip on live-searching - I have actually been using this before, but it didn't work properly - however now it does, so I get exactly the expected result .

Hmmm, actually I have just been doing a few different 'spotlight' searches, and it doesn't seem to find many of the correct files. Basically if I look for the word 'alloengraftment' bookends will only find 1 article, whereas the apple spotlight search will find 3 (including a file where the word is in the abstract - so this will be found in Bookends if I use the "All fields" option). All the three articles are in the bookends library and the correct files are attached to the correct references (and placed in the default attachment folder). Any idea what is going on here? Since I was using PathFinder, I also tried this search having the Finder running in the background, but with the same result.....

Not really -- Bookends simply calls the Mac OS X APIs. Maybe the index in your db needs refreshing -- try rebuilding the database.

Jon
Sonny Software

Hmmm this is very weird. Tried to rebuild the database, reattach the file, create a new reference, etc. but to no avail. Bookends still won't find these files correctly - even though the Finder spotlight search will find them just fine.

Strange.... Maybe there's a bug somewhere when acquiring spotlight data?


UPDATE
Okay, even more strange behaviour here. If I reattach the file and automatically rename it to the name suggested by Bookends (e.g. "Author et al. 2007"), then it will find the file correctly. Renaming the file to something else (with a long filename) then it will not find the file... Any suggestions?

I think this should move off-forum and be dealt with as tech support...

Jon
Sonny Software

In case anybody else would have similar problems with spotlight searches, it turned out if the filename contained "+" or "()" then it wouldn't be displayed....

Jon fixed it and a silent update made.

Thanks again for this amazing tech support!