Found App : All-in-One Search For All Your Files in Cloud Or Mac
Sure, it’s easy enough to find files on your hard drive, if your Mac is right in front of you, and maybe you can find documents in your Gmail account quickly enough, if you sign in to the website in your browser. However, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to search all those places — and more — from a single app, without signing into every service individually? The makers of Found App have declared that you can do all this. This app lets you find word documents, emails, contacts, music and more from your Mac or cloud drive accounts. We certainly like the sound of that, so we decided to get to know the program a little better.
Features
Found App is still in its infancy, so you’ll have to enter your email to be put on the waiting list before you can use it. You can sync your computer’s hard drive, Gmail attachments, Dropbox and Google Docs, all of which are popular services that we have used on occasion. You can add these accounts from the “Sources” tab, and you can even add multiple of each type of account.
A single interface allows you to search for documents, and results will appear as you type, similar to Google’s instant search feature. Results will be grouped by their location and, one thing we really like, is the ability to drag and drop those files from their current locations to our current location. You can move Gmail documents to Dropbox, for instance. You can also instantly preview documents from your multiple accounts, even while offline, which seems like a handy feature.
There are not a lot of bells and whistles with this program. It’s meant to do what it does, and we respect that.
Room for Improvement (It’s Quite Big!)
We do have a couple critiques about this system, and hopefully that will be addressed as it matures. For starters, it only seems to be available for Macs, which leaves Windows users out in the cold. On the other hand, Mac users often have the same complaint about software, so this might just be balancing things out.
Furthermore, the name suggests it’s a smartphone app, not a computer program, and we’d love to see that be the case. Because of SEO alone, this app might appear when users are specifically looking for an app for their iPhone, not their MacBook.
The type of cloud providers you can add is a bit limited. We’re sure this will expand in the future, but Dropbox is hardly the only cloud storage solution out there. There are plenty of programs that allow us to access services like Box, SugarSync as well. So Found App is going to have to do some catching up before we become too attached.
Right now, it looks like Found App only search through file names, so while we love the ability to even find Gmail attachments, we think this would be much more useful if it had the ability to search through document contents, too.
See below interview on TCTV with FoundApp founders Stephen Brady and Vijay Sundaram
In conclusion, FoundApp has potential but the creators will have to act quickly to make it more useful or noticeable than similar software, which already exists and allows us to connect to more cloud services simultaneously. It’s difficult to say much more this early in the game, however.
