Leap - 2.0.3

9 out of 10 times I run into a roadblock when I try to accomplish any specific task. This is unbelievably ridiculous.

I'm one of those Mac users pathologically addicted to the Finder. Habit, I guess. It's part of my brain at this point. Had no interest in replacements; that is, ,until Leap. Leap was a great program, but Leap 2 is even better; more intuitive, nice GUI enhancements, faster. It really gives me a reason to spend a bit of extra time tagging important documents (which is very easy with Default Folder and Yep). Finding documents is so easy and, that serendipity stuff alluded to on Ironic's web stie actually is very useful. In looking for a specific document, you stumble across related items you had forgotten were there. In some cases you find something that works better than what you were looking for and, in the best case, something you find triggers a great idea, a new fork in the road or unsticks something that has bogged you thought process down for weeks. Anyway, I really like it. I had trouble downloading the file initially and emailed support which responded quickly with a new link.

Combined with it's sister app, Fresh, Leap is a powerful tool for using a very flat foler hierarchy (I've switched to only having 6 folders in my Documents folder) and finding exactly what I need very quickly.

With Fresh, the files I'm using right now are always handy. If they're slightly older, a quick search in Leap and there it is! Thanks lads!

It takes a while to wrap your head around this program and for my own purposes I see its greatest strength in finessing specific projects with user-created tags and other parameters. In that regard, it is far superior to Spotlight, which seems to me best suited for very fast, non-specific searches. Anyway, I made my purchase after using it for about 12 days of the one-month demo period. Part of my purchase was based on excellent technical support, which was very quickly responsive to some very lengthy e-mail exchanges that helped me understand how best to use this program.

Leap is not for everyone. But for those who really need powerful search capabilities, integration with Quick Look, and a variety of ways to quickly view results, I’m not sure anything else comes as close, and I tried a few other competitive projects.

That said, I think Leap would do well to lower the price by about ten bucks.

Leap looks and feels like a heavy duty file search, tag and management tool, unfortunately it performs as quite the opposite. Leap fails miserably at offering a more powerful management utility. The price tag would be borderline questionable for caliber applications much less this flopware. Both Filespot and HoudahSpot deliver much more powerful search capabilities for a fraction of the price. Actually, Leopard's Finder enables more powerful searches than Leap for no extra cost. I wonder if the developers are even aware of Leopard's default search capabilities-otherwise why would anyone develop a tool that doesn't even rival the Finder much less surpass it.