MoRU review

Spotlight is fine for simple searches of your hard disk, but it isn't without its problems.

It tends to start searching as soon as you start typing, which slows everything down, while advanced searching is difficult without opening a Smart Folder in the Finder. So it's great to see an alternative interface in the shape of MoRU.

MoRU lets you set up elaborate search criteria, but nothing happens until you want it to. There are two kinds of search: a Quick Search, which is similar to Spotlight's menu bar control, but waits for you to hit return before it starts searching; and the Smart Group Search, which is designed for more advanced queries and allows you to specify locations, search strings, file types, modified dates and pretty much anything else you could wish to search for and filter by.

Any search you create is automatically added to the list of saved searches in the sidebar, which comes pre-populated with a list of useful searches such as Applications and Microsoft Office Documents.

Better still, all of these saved searches gets a keyboard shortcut, so you can flit between them with ease. Suddenly, MoRU starts to offer much more than just better Spotlight searching: you start to see ways in which it might become an asset to workflow, file management and staying organised. While it can't claim to be an alternative to the Finder, it certainly offers excellent complementary features. Unlike a standard Spotlight results window, MoRU gives every file's path, for example.

Sadly, it can only display one browser window at a time; it would sometimes be nice to display results from two different searches side by side. But control-clicking on any item pulls up an impressive contextual menu, making file moves and copies easy.

MoRU is dependable, well designed and excellent value. It's a pity Apple didn't build Spotlight this way in the first place.