What’s new in FoxTrot 8

FoxTrot Professional introduces - and includes - the new FoxTrot Duplicate Search

Since its 2005 launch, FoxTrot’s design has focused on precision searching and making the number of results manageable.

One way to achieve this is to search, by default, for full words and suggest moderate usage of wildcards.

Another contributor is to offer multiple additive categorizations, in order to focus the user’s attention on a manageable and plausible number of hits.

Our work with customers and surveys has now prioritized reducing the number of duplicate and similar files before indexing. To this end, we are introducing a clean-sheet approach to duplicate identification and elimination.

Duplicate apps are a dime a dozen, and some obviously have pretty good features. But we think none are as comprehensive to iteratively sanitize an indexable data universe before using FoxTrot Pro - hence FoxTrot Duplicate Search’s unique features:

  • Four methods to identify duplicates:
    • filename (with or without extension)
    • content
    • duration, for time-based media such as video and audio
    • a list of Spotlight attributes
  • A dual list allowing display of all suspected duplicates on top and all variants of the selected duplicate on the bottom
  • Direct actions such as Move to Bin, Delete immediately, Open in source application, Quick Look, etc…
  • Powerful actions for batch selection by a number of criteria
  • FoxTrot Pro action menu item to search for duplicate files among selected documents

Indexing improvements

PDF OCR: Scanned PDF documents can now be processed for Optical Character Recognition on macOS 13 Ventura or later to index their textual content.

Images OCR: Scanned image files (.jpg, .png etc) can now be converted to PDF documents and processed for Optical Character Recognition on macOS 13 Ventura or later to index their textual content.

Search improvements

You can now search for some Spotlight attributes that do not have a display name or description, and you can even manually add attributes that have not been declared by any application.

Added support for “logical size” and “text content length” when filtering by Spotlight attribute.

User interface improvements

Restore last used values when adding or toggling search criteria.

Added “Did you know” tips window.

Added “Open with…” contextual menu item, to open a found file using a specific application.

Other improvements

Improved thumbnail generation speed in Thumbnails View mode.