Neometric updates Catalog to version 1.2.2
Neometric Software's Catalog does what so many other applications do: it catalogs and indexes your CDs, DVDs, external hard drives and other media so that you can still search and browse those discs when they're offline. Think of it as Spotlight for all your removable media. I've been using CDFinder for this task for many years and it's always served me well. But I'm not adverse to change, so I thought I'd try a demo of the latest update. Version 1.2.2 contains numerous bug fixes, a modified user interface and some speed improvements to the indexing engine. It's $20 to buy, or you can use the fully-functional demo for free, for up to 5 catalogs (if you can tolerate the startup delay nag). It supports Mac OS X 10.3 or later.
Catalog claims that what sets it apart from all the others is that it's "blazingly fast." You don't think I'm going to let a comment like that go unchallenged, do you? More after the jump...
Here's how their claim holds up. Using the demo, I created a catalog of a firewire drive I happened to have connected to my Powerbook. It's a 60GB drive with 12.45GB of data in the form of approx 54,000 files. It took Catalog 4 minutes, 40 seconds to index the drive. Then I launched CDFinder and told it to do the same.
Catalog uses the same incremental "search as you type" feature that forced me to disable Spotlight, so I was prepared to hate it. Fortunately – it works a LOT
better in Catalog than it does in any other app, including Spotlight,
that I can think of. It's fast. Really fast. Blazingly fast? Not quite
- but a lot faster than CDFinder, which is still indexing that same drive and it's only about half-way through after running for 45 minutes already. It looks good, too, in that it's the familiar "Cocoa–Lucious"
GUI you're already used to.
Using an app for 20 minutes isn't exactly the basis for a thorough review, but it was certainly long enough for me to tell that it does what it says and it doesn't waste any time doing it. I think this one may be a keeper.