We’re really pleased to announce that the next version of FileLocator Pro and Agent Ransack is now available for download:

https://www.mythicsoft.com/filelocatorpro/download/

There’s lots of nice new features including:

• New visual themes (including a Dark theme)
• Improved indexing functionality, including a new automatic update scheduler, index groups, and indexing of archives (e.g. zip, tar etc).
• Optical Character Recognition (OCR) functionality
• Many more small updates and fixes

Visual Themes

This release uses a new UI framework, which among other things, includes a few new themes:

Standard theme	Dark theme
Blue theme	Silver theme

The new default font size has been improved so you should find the UI a bit easier to work with.

Going forward the new framework also provides flexibility for adding many small visual improvements customers have been asking for, which we’ll be adding over the release cycle.

Indexing Improvements

Index searching is great when it works but tracking down issues, especially understanding why searches are not returning the expected results, can be difficult. With this release the product shares more information about the results of the indexing process and the data stored in the actual index.

The Explore tab shows the data stored in the index as a tree view representation. Indexed items are shown along with the index meta data, such as index date, term count, status and more.

If an item is not being shown in the index use the Update Log to view which items the indexer worked on.

The Update Log shows information recorded by the indexer, such as any errors that might have occurred and how the item was indexed, e.g. Name Only, or Content etc. Finally, there are another two tabs (History and Messages) showing further information and providing feedback on the indexing process.

Index Scheduler

To keep indexes up to date the product now includes an index scheduler to either update the index at set periods and/or real-time monitoring of the index locations.

One important restriction for the index scheduler is that it runs as an invisible process whilst a user is logged in. If you need the index updated without a user logged in then you’ll need to use something like Windows Task Scheduler.

Index Groups

Some indexes are so large that they should be broken down into smaller more manageable indexes. However, previously it was not possible to search all the separate indexes at one time. With Index Groups indexes can be grouped together so they can be searched as if they were one single index.

Ordered Search

Normally files are searched in the order they are discovered but now it’s possible to search them in a predefined order, either by Name, Folder Depth, Size, or Modified date.

OCR Searching

OCR searching enables the product to search scanned documents or faxes. Since the OCR process is very CPU intensive the Cache option is switched on by default. Help: OCR Settings

Others

Other additions include:

• RAR5 searching
• ZIP and other archive indexing
• Floating license service
• Many more minor fixes and improvements.

Wildcards == DOS Expression

The expression type ‘DOS Expression’ is now called ‘Wildcards’, a small but potentially confusing change for long term users.

Upgrading from older versions (prior to 2016)

If you are upgrading from older versions of the product, ie FileLocator Pro v7 or Agent Ransack 2014 or earlier,  we recommend that you first uninstall the product rather than trying to directly install over the top. If you do want to install over the top and it doesn’t work please run the installer again and use the ‘Repair’ option to fix any issues.

Roadmap

As usual we’ve had to make some tough decisions on what new functionality to include and what to postpone. Here’s just a few of the missing items that will be added before the end of this release cycle.

• Highlighting of search terms in PDF/Word preview
• Searching PDF attachments
• Embedded Word document searching
• Improved image EXIF searching
• DWG Reader
• History editing
• Single instance mode

And, of course, there will be other improvements driven by your feedback.

Thank You

Thanks to all the beta testers who helped identify some difficult to find bugs, it’s made a real difference.

So, the last thing to say is please try it out and let us know what you think, your enthusiastic requests, bug reports, and general support keep making the product better and better.