Screen Sieve lets you search the contents of the currently active window at any time. It highlights all occurrences of characters, words and phrases as you type, without requiring modifications to applications. Putting Mac OS X' built-in support for Accessibility to good use, Screen Sieve works with any application that supports the Accessibility APIs. Applications that do include Mail, Safari, Xcode and the Finder, as well as most other applications written in Cocoa and to some extent Carbon.
Screen Sieve lets you configure the hotkey used to invoke it, as well as the color used
What's New
Version 1.2.1:
Adds support for searching in windows under the cursor, not just the currently focused window.
Requirements
PPC / Intel, Mac OS X 10.4 or later. Leopard is supported.
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Love the program, but it would be much more useful if it would fully work in all apps. I would love to use this with Pages, Keynote, iCal and Accordance Bible.
Nice, clean, simple design.
I only wish it would be possible to use a menu item rather than a dock icon, and even the option to use neither (with a global hotkey to open the front end).
I was trying this out when the frontmost window was owned by Activity Monitor. The highlighted selections were correct immediately after typing my search string, but errors started to appear quickly after that. After a while, most of the matches were incorrect. Conclusion: this seems not to work for windows whose contents change. Any way to make this work? Am I correct?
Edit to my last post (and forgive me for comment bloating): I just realized that you can, in fact, use this within Finder itself! Blazing app, this! Thanks again and I'll keep my commenting constrained now. :)
By the way, adding to my little list of modest feature requests below.
- This is a far out one. And might be too complicated to implement, but here goes: How about Finder desktop/and window support!? You'd be able to pinpoint files on the desktop in a snap! (Sure, you can type the first letters of a file, and the Finder will mark the first matching file for you. But you can't show multiple matches with the Finder.) Just a suggestion, not crucially important, but would be awesome if it's possible.
- Some way of scrolling through results further down in the window. For instance, I'm using Command-Ctrl-F for ScreenSieve, and it would be cool to be able to use Command-Ctrl-G for a page down action, plus showing more results along the document. (Maybe enabling the use of Arrow down/up within the context of having ScreenSieve showing the results would be cool also.)
- Some way for ScreenSieve to remember searches between "sessions" (i.e. after closing ScreenSieve and invoking it once again). So that you can close ScreenSieve and then hit, for instance, said Command-Ctrl-G (or the key combo you have specified) to search again, in the same, or even another window.
- Sparkle updating? :) Not a biggie.
Just some spontaneous thoughts. I am very grateful for this invention of yours, Developer! Great work.
A small handy, simple and effective searching tool which is always there. Just a key-combo, some letters, and you got the highlighted result on your screen view.
I tried this in the Finder and Mail and it didn't work. The screen faded but no window was highlighted and typing text didn't find anything. Yes, I did have support for assistive devices enabled.
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Screen Sieve lets you search the contents of the currently active window at any time. It highlights all occurrences of characters, words and phrases as you type, without requiring modifications to applications. Putting Mac OS X' built-in support for Accessibility to good use, Screen Sieve works with any application that supports the Accessibility APIs. Applications that do include Mail, Safari, Xcode and the Finder, as well as most other applications written in Cocoa and to some extent Carbon.
Screen Sieve lets you configure the hotkey used to invoke it, as well as the color used when Screen Sieve fades your screen. It can also be configured to start automatically when you log in.
+202
+3
borderlandcross reviewed on 02 Jan 2007
Nice, clean, simple design.
-2
I only wish it would be possible to use a menu item rather than a dock icon, and even the option to use neither (with a global hotkey to open the front end).
Makes it feel integrated ino Mac OS X.
+39
+103
+103
- This is a far out one. And might be too complicated to implement, but here goes: How about Finder desktop/and window support!? You'd be able to pinpoint files on the desktop in a snap! (Sure, you can type the first letters of a file, and the Finder will mark the first matching file for you. But you can't show multiple matches with the Finder.) Just a suggestion, not crucially important, but would be awesome if it's possible.
+103
hced reviewed on 19 Dec 2006
I only have some modest requests:
- Dock-less operation.
- Some way of scrolling through results further down in the window. For instance, I'm using Command-Ctrl-F for ScreenSieve, and it would be cool to be able to use Command-Ctrl-G for a page down action, plus showing more results along the document. (Maybe enabling the use of Arrow down/up within the context of having ScreenSieve showing the results would be cool also.)
- Some way for ScreenSieve to remember searches between "sessions" (i.e. after closing ScreenSieve and invoking it once again). So that you can close ScreenSieve and then hit, for instance, said Command-Ctrl-G (or the key combo you have specified) to search again, in the same, or even another window.
- Sparkle updating? :) Not a biggie.
Just some spontaneous thoughts. I am very grateful for this invention of yours, Developer! Great work.
+7
foto555 reviewed on 19 Dec 2006
compass reviewed on 19 Dec 2006
-2
+14
Nmege rated on 22 May 2011