Find anything on your Mac

Leap is a pretty ingenuous little app that lets you find any file on your Mac, even if you’re not sure where it is. Whereas Mac’s Spotlight is purely based on search, Leap also incorporates tags, places, file types and more. You can use the find-as-you-type search feature or simply one of the many other options available. We quite like the center column of Leap, where tag size is relevant to the amount of corresponding files. Leap will also reference all file types and let you search according to them. You’ll also notice that it includes Spotlight search, placed at the bottom left of the interface.

The friendly GUI shows thumbnail views of all your files and you can close up or zoom in on any one of them with the loupe function. Double clicking on an item will open it in a popup window. Any file can be flagged for future reference or hidden. You can also view and edit information for files, like adding tags to make them easier to find.

Leap was a bit sluggish at startup, when it referenced all files in the system, but once up and running it worked well. Given the number of search possibilities at hand, you’re bound to find what you’re looking for. If there’s one other little complaint we could place, it’s that the interface can feel a bit crowded, what with all the lists and different items present in the program window.

Leap is an excellent program giving you multiple ways of finding any file in your Mac.

With Leap you find things based on your natural memory of that file. “Hhmm it was a big photoshop file of a basketball court” or “Something I tagged important” or “A word document somewhere in my documents folder” (feel free to substitute your own here). With the Finder though, it’s more like “I think it might be called bball.psd and that I put it in the originals folder in images in the Project 29 folder which I think I put in Documents… nope, not there… where did I put it?”

Finally a way to quickly tag documents. Instantly call up tagged documents using Leap’s tag cloud.

Peruse found documents visually by thumbnail or using a more traditional list. Choose how large or small to show the documents. Add tags, open documents in your favorite program, email them, throw them out—they’re at your command.