RocketBox Review

One of the most common complaints with Apple’s Mail.app is search speed. Several trusted friends and mac-gurus have told me how the search function in mail slows them down. My mail database contains about 25,000 items and I’ve never had much of a problem with Mail’s search. While 25,000 seems like a lot of messages, I know some people have multiples of that number and I suspect that is where Mail.app starts falling down.

Central Atomics “RocketBox” attempts to pick up the slack with mail search.

This $15 mail plugin seeks to take over where the built in search leaves off. The first time you install RocketBox, it will spend some time chugging through your existing e-mail database. It took about 20 minutes on my machine. Once installed, you can easily turn RocketBox off and revert to the built-in search if you choose.

According to the developer, this plug-in searches your mail up to 200 times faster than Mail.app. While I suspect RocketBox’s speed improvements would be more noticeable with a larger library, for me there was no significant difference in speed.

However, RocketBox isn’t just about the search speed. RocketBox has an autofill feature that fills in a name. However, it only works with first names. If I start typing “Miles”, the RocketBox search will prompt me to auto fill “Miles Davis.” However, if I typed “Davis”, RocketBox won’t help.

Also, RocketBox does not do partial search. This is a feature built into the Mail.app search. For instance, if I type “DAV”, Mail.app will already start grinding through my database. RocketBox doesn’t start until you complete the search. It supports several different search syntaxes and boolean operators. You can combine and qualify search filters to combine names, dates, accounts, and even flags.

One of the biggest differences with the baked-in search are the results. Rather than provide a list of messages, RocketBox opens its own window and shows the content of the e-mails it finds matching your search with the specific search terms highlighted. This list can then be sorted by date or relevance. This is a nice improvement. However, RocketBox often showed the same message multiple times, which became tedious.

RocketBox is a great idea. If you are a Mail.app user and experiencing unacceptable search speeds, it may be what you are looking for. There are quite a few features in the built-in search that simply are not available in RocketBox, create smart folders from a search for instance but I suspect this first release is just a toe hold and the feature list will quickly grow. You can download a free trial.

Minimal Mac

I make no secret of the fact that my Mac related RSS feed list is pretty small. Recently, however, I discovered Minimal Mac and immediately made room for it in my feed reader. So just a few weeks after discovering this site, you can imagine my delight this morning at finding Minimal Mac linking our MPU Merlin Mann interview. The circle is complete.

Air Harp

What a great idea.

Typography for Lawyers

Outstanding site for lawyers in particular and writers in general.

iPad Bento

MacRumors discovered that Filemaker is releasing Bento for the iPad. While this isn’t much of a surprise (Filemaker is owned by Apple), I’m looking forward to accessing my Bento data on the go. Hopefully they will have some interesting form input mode like Numbers appears to.

Photo from MacRumors.com

Thanks technoesq for the tip.

ABA Techshow 2010

I’m on the ground in Chicago for the second straight year talking about Macs and other sufficiently nerdy subjects at the American Bar Association’s Techshow. I’ve already met several new friends (like iPhoneJD publisher Jeff Richardson) and am now locking myself in to polish my presentations. If you are in attendance, make sure to stop by and introduce yourself. In addition to my sessions, I’ll also be co-hosting a dinner tomorrow with Mr. MacLawyer himself, Ben Stevens and I’ll be available to chat at the conference concierge desk on Friday the 26th for two hours starting at 10 a.m. If you are here, come by and say hello. We can compare menu bars.

Mac Power Users, #2 Technology Podcast

We have received an overwhelming amount of positive feedback for our new “Workflows” series. Of course it helps that we kicked it off with Merlin Mann and his sublime nerdiness. Tonight I was flabergasted to see the MPU as #2 on Apple’s list of top technology podcasts. Amazing. Thank you to all the listeners (veterans and newcomers) and Merlin for joining in the fun.

Kindle Reader for Mac

Amazon has released a beta of its Kindle Reader for Mac. I’ve been waiting for this one. I’ve purchased a lot of reference materials on my Kindle and having them on my Mac will be great. Since these books are all tied into the Kindle DRM, let’s hope they are also working on an iPad application.

Update on Saturday, March 20, 2010 at 9:59PM by David Sparks

For a much more considered look at the Kindle for Mac software, take a look at John’s post at the Creativityist.

Nectar Apple Store Points

Thank you Nectar for sponsoring another month of the MacSparky RSS feed. For UK Apple Store points, check it out.

The Q Trick

Merlin shared this on the Mac Power Users and I thought it was brilliant. I also do the same thing with “PPP” on the other side of the keyboard. The law stuff gets “P”s. Everything else gets “Q”s.