Things have been quiet on the desktop search front for a while but Copernic has just announced the next round of engagement with the public beta release of Copernic Desktop Search 1.5. The big news is support for Mozilla Thunderbird and Eudora e-mail and indexing of network drives (formerly the exclusive province of commercial tools like x1). But there's a ton of other good stuff in this release. Here's a list and a link to the what's new page. Download it here.

• Mozilla Thunderbird email search

  • Indexing of emails, attachments and contacts from Thunderbird 1.0 or later

• Eudora email search

  • Indexing of emails and attachments from Eudora 5.0 or later

• Smart indexing of network drives

  • Full support for indexing network folders

  • Intelligent detection of network connection availability

• Improved metadata indexing for pictures, music and videos

  • Search within JPEG picture comments (using EXIF metadata)

  • Search iTunes songs by artist, album, etc.

  • Metadata indexing for QuickTime movies and OGG audio files

• New information pane listing additional categories with matching results

  • One-click access to related results from other categories

  • Display of match count per category

• Buttons to instantly seek to highlighted search terms

  • New word-find buttons allowing to jump from one keyword occurrence to the other within document previews

• Previewing of found pictures, music, videos and contacts

  • Filmstrip viewing mode for pictures

  • Embedded player for audio and video files

  • New preview pane for contacts

• Improved usability

  • Added "Print" and "Delete" commands for Outlook emails

  • New filter to narrow picture searches by size (small, medium, large)

  • Improved option tab for managing custom file extensions to index

  • Customizable colors for search term highlighting

  • Numerous user interface improvements (redesigned preview panes, redesigned Web search toolbar, new keyboard shortcuts, etc.)

• API for adding custom file indexers

  • New COM API allowing third-party developers to create plug-ins enabling new file type indexing (view PDF documentation)

Other Improvements/Changes:

• 20 file types have been added to the default list of types to index

• Wildcards can now be used to add custom file extensions to index

I'll post my impressions after I drive it for a while.

UPDATE: First impressions are:

1. It seems faster at indexing than the previous version.

2. IMAP mail is still a hit-or-miss proposition. Sometimes it can display a preview of the message, other times it can't. Sometimes it remembers the account setting, other times it doesn't (and has generated one spontaneous crash when I tried to reestablish the settings).

3. The Tablet Input Panel (TIP) is totally broken when you try to use ink in the deskbar. The  TIP works fine in the main application window. This needs to be fixed. If you use a Tablet, send them a report asking this be corrected. It's just bad coding on the pop up window the deskbar presents to allow you to filter your search. None of the other searc tool deskbars have this problem.