Gone East

Quickfile lives!

One of the very first programs for the Macintosh, back in 1984, was a simple, but very useful thing called Rolodex. It was written by Bill Atkinson. It was for keeping names, numbers and other things you might record on cards. Soon after its introduction Bill apparently got a letter from the Rolodex card file people and so he had to change its name to Quickfile.

All Quickfile was was a "card" -- for writing names, numbers, whatever -- and a search field, for finding things. It was simple to use and FAST. Even on those ancient CPUs it could search extrememly large lists of names very quickly.

I used Quickfile for years, it continued to work like a champ up through System 7 and beyond. Many people migrated over to the more feature-rich, commercial program QuickDEX. But I stayed with the original.

I finally left Quickfile behind in the late 90s when I started keeping my phone book on a Palm Pilot.

About a year ago I went looking for a copy of Quickfile, and discovered that it even still sorta worked on OSX. But the advances of the OS had finally introduced enough bugs to make it impractical to use this old friend for my phone book.

I'd never warmed up to QuickDEX cause, for me, it had TOO MANY features. I wanted Quickfile's simplicity.

Yesterday I read in Macintouch about mooDEX. It is "...designed to fill the gap left by the program called QuickDEX..." But in fact it was more like Quickfile. Simple, fast... and a native OS X program to boot!

I downloaded it and loaded alot of my phone book info. I'm really impressed, happy, and feeling that warm-fuzzy Quickfile feeling. I think it's a keeper.

The only thing I wish they'd done different is that Quickfile did boolean OR searches, which were great for quickly finding the card you wanted without having to flip through multiple cards till the desired one appears. But this is a nit.

Try mooDex. It's shareware, and only $7!

Posted by jghiii at September 26, 2003 09:25 AM