This week I'm pleased to welcome a new sponsor to MacSparky, HoudahSpot. Imagine if there were a group of engineers at Apple that wanted to turn up the Spotlight search a notch or two and had nobody in management to tell them "no". That's what you get with HoudahSpot.

HoudahSpot lets you search your Mac like a boss. It improves upon Spotlight to let you find files by multiple criteria, like name, text, content kind, author, recipient, and pixel count just to name a few. You can combine these search criteria to drill in quickly and choose which locations HoudahSpot looks in and which locations it ignores. You can even set up templates for repeat searches.

I've used HoudahSpot for years and if you haven't tried it yet, you should. Here's a quick war story. In a recent trial I had things go a little bit wonky with some PDFs I wanted to use as exhibits. I suddenly found myself with a "needle in the haystack" scenario with 10 minutes to find the documents. I knew they were there …somewhere… and I cooked up a quick HoudahSpot query that found them with time to spare.

Anyway, don't take my word for it, go try out the app. If you like it you can get 20% off with the coupon code MACSPARKY or purchase through this link. There's no better way to search your Mac.