mackay@dalcsug.UUCP (Daniel MacKay) (05/28/88)
Hi! Just got my FastFind Pro in the mail. It is REALLY slick. Despite the ad saying "Added RAM! Increased desktop!! Etc!!" All it REALLY does is search for strings in files. Fast. - that's right, sort of like 'grep'. It will snoop through a whole 144K disk in 20 seconds or so, every file, looking for a pattern. It also: - recursively snoops thru subdirectories if you tell it - has up to 50 and/or/not logical operators, i.e. if the search pattern is '//c,D?S' Fastfind will find records (see below) containing '//c' AND a three letter pattern beginning with D and ending with S - logical and wildcard chars can be changed as convenient. Fastfind remembers them in a little Z..SETUP file. - Matches can be case sensitive or not (toggle). - Runs under ProDOS 8, there's a DOS version for 48Kers. Here's how it works: you tell Fastfind what files to look for (by drive#, slot, prefix, pathname, whatever), and the search pattern. It then quickly snoops through all records in all the files and scrolls them by on your screen, prints them on the printer, or writes them to a new file. Files must be smaller than 17Meg. What is a record? You tell Fastfind what character delimits records. In my freeform AppleWriter database, C/Rs are the delimiters, but in Appleworks word processor files, <DEL>s are delimiters. By judiciously using different delimiters, you can load varying amounts of a "record". Fastfind intelligently throws away all the binary formatting bytes when it displays (writes, prints) if you tell it to. If you put a file called Z..ABBRE in the directory you're searching, Fastfind will scroll it up on the screen when you hit 'A'- it's a reminder file for abbreviations you've used in the database. One index to some magazine comes free with the Fastfind, one year's index of: A+, Call-A.P.P.L.E., INCIDER, Nat Geo, Byte, Open-Apple. I got the 87 index to Open-Apple and it seems good. Each record is a string of keywords, a short description of the article, and the volume and # of the magazine. Also comes with a Bird-like quitter program to make switching between editor and FastFind slicker if you don't have a desktop program. Since there isn't a builtin editor, I'm hesitant to call this a "freeform database manager". But it is one of the handier pieces of software I've ever seen. Application itself is only 17K. For anything that doesn't fit into a AppleWorks record well, it's really great (i.e. big records or something too big to fit in a file (not a problem for me with 750K in my //c, of course), anything with complicated search logic). It searches incredibly quickly on my 512K RAMdisk, assume it would be excellent on a harddisk. One complaint: I like 80-column screens. Fastfind flips back and forth. the main menu is in 40-cols, the find pattern screen (and where the data scrolls by) is in 80-cols. I'd like it to be in 80 all the time. Anyway, I'm impressed. WELL worth the 49.95$US (+2$ S&H). I VISA ordered it, and I got it a few days later. Good service. Good product. Recommend it. --- +---------+ Dalhousie University | _ | From the Halifax, Nova Scotia | (_)===| Disk of ... Canada | | Daniel mackay@dalcsug.UUCP +---------+ ...{utai,uunet}!dalcs!dalcsug!mackay