We think Apple should replace Spotlight with HoudahSpot, a much more flexible tool for searching the contents of your Mac.

I just upgraded to Leopard, and there seems to be something missing from Spotlight. Whenever I get the results of a Spotlight search, I can’t customize the columns to show me Date Created, Date Modified, or Size. These are the most important criteria for me when looking through search results.

You are correct. When you perform a Spotlight search in Leopard and bring up the results window in the Finder, the only noncustomizable columns that appear are Name, Kind, and Last Opened.

One quick tip that may help you is to use the Inspector. The Inspector is a floating window that dynamically changes to show the attributes of any item that you click on in a Spotlight results or Finder window. You can bring up the Inspector by clicking on the File menu and then holding down the Option key on your keyboard, which will change the Get Info command to Show Inspector. You can also use the keyboard shortcut Command-Option-I.

But the Inspector still may not be enough if you want to sort by different columns or view the same attributes of all your items at a glance. In that case, you’ll want to try HoudahSpot ($24.44, www
.houdah.com), a search utility based on Spotlight that gives you a wide range of flexibility and customization.

Among its dozens useful features, HoudahSpot can search, show, and sort by any attributes that are indexed by Spotlight. It can also add its own search menu to your menubar for easy accessibility, exclude searching in certain folders, remember how you customized your results for each individual search, and much more.