Blip

The easy way to locate files

Tired of waiting for Spotlight to stop grinding? For many searches, there's an easier and faster alternative built into the BSD foundation of Mac OS X. Blip brings useful functions and a friendly face to the power of the locate tool.

Download Blip 1.0 [172 KB]

Blip requires Mac OS X v10.4 ("Tiger") and is Universal.

Download Blip 1.0 source code [182 KB]

Xcode 2.3 "xcodeproj" project, BSD license.

Some answers to questions you might ask

Blip uses the tool locate, which works differently from Spotlight. This results in speed gains and finding files in places Spotlight doesn't go, but it also has some downsides:

• locate, and therefore Blip, is faster than Spotlight by only indexing file names. This makes file name searching the only kind of searching you can do with Blip, but it will go blindingly fast.
• locate keeps a database as a result of re-indexing the hard drive every so often. This is a different approach than Spotlight and means that you will not be able to find a file you just created.
• locate is case sensitive.

If you don't find what you're looking for with a Blip search, you can pick "Spotlight" from the "File" menu to open up a Spotlight search window with your query filled out.

If you typed your search out and nothing happens, hit Enter to start running the search.

This is how Blip looks.

Blip is missing something I'd really like!

That is probably the case - however, we wanted to let you have it sooner than later. Send an email to Jesper with your ideas. We'll be happy to hear them.