"Precipitate" More Often – Google Docs in your Spotlight

development 18 July 2008 | View Comments

I recently found out about an open source OSX App called Precipitate via Viddler’s Brandice, via Viddler’s Colin Devroe. The original app was created by Stuart Morgan, who I can’t find a freaking thing about except that he participated in last year’s “Google: Summer of Code”. Stuart, if you’re out there, drop me a line. I wanna thank you personally for this app and keeping it open source.

Precipitate is a simple prefpane that, once installed, regularly scans your Google Documents repository for a given Google account (only supports one at a time, right now), and makes those documents available in OSX Spotlight searches.

My only complaint: I’m working in a lot of docs that are changing regularly, so the built in “scan for new/changed files every 60 minutes” interval was too long.

Luckily, as I said, it’s open source. So I pulled down a copy, started poking around Xcode, and found the interval and switched it to every 3 minutes.

I had some compile issues due to a whacked out dev environment, but with the help of Dave Martorana (of MultiFireFox fame) got it compiled and it’s now been running and scanning every 3 minutes.

My version (changing less than a single line of code) is available on my S3 Account, as “Precipitate More Often“. The license is the same as the original. The entire codebase is the same as the original, with the exception of the interval.

Download NowPrecipitate More Often 1.0

Hope you enjoy.

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  • Precipitate 1.0.3 is out, and it has hidden prefs to support both refresh interval changes and opening docs in an arbitrary application.
  • Stuart Morgan
    Colin: FYI, support for opening a given source's files with an arbitrary app is something I plan to land in Precipitate within the next week or so (which is all you need, assuming Fluid is capable of handling URL open requests).
  • As a follow up, I'm hoping to somehow get links from Spotlight to any Google Doc to open in a Fluid SSB application. Which would make my life complete!

    Once this is done, I'll link it up on my site.
  • I'm REALLY glad I found that through Colin. It's pretty awesome. :)
  • Stuart Morgan
    I'm glad you are finding Precipitate useful!

    The next version will support a hidden preference to control the update interval, so you shouldn't need to maintain your custom build for long.
  • Very cool little tool. Thanks for the point out.
    cheers

    scott
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