Troy Landers' Blog

Here is a good, short article about designing web sites that are usable for older users.

Copernic Desktop Search has become one of my desktop's killer apps. It saves me an incredible amount of time searching for files, emails, etc... - and it is free! Free desktop search tools are nothing new, but this is the best one that I've found.

Originally I used the default file searching in Windows. For a while this kept me happy, but beginning with Windows XP (maybe sooner) the interface got prettier and its usefulness disappeared. I remember several times when I couldn't configure it to locate files that I knew existed. It also has several other shortcomings...

• It does not use an index. Instead each search does a full scan of the sub-directory each time you search for something. This is time consuming and inefficient.
• It does not search emails. I have lots of emails with important information that I often need to find. As a side note, Outlook's "Advanced Find" feature stinks too.

Google Desktop Search is another well-known desktop search tool. I experimented with it briefly in 2005 but I was disappointed that it only indexed and searched a limited number of email and document types. The supported types include Outlook emails and most Microsoft documents, all of which are good. Unfortunately I'm a developer (for searching anyway) and I need to search many other file types that are not supported and that are obviously low on Google's list.

These disappointments eventually led me to Copernic. Copernic indexes all of the files that I want and it does it when my computer is idle. It also does NOT index files that I don't want it to search (e.g. backups and temp directories). When I search for something in Copernic I am almost always amazed at how quickly it helps me find what I'm looking for.

The only feature that I wish Copernic had was regular expression searches. Admittedly this is probably hard to do, but man would it be cool and powerful!