Screen Sieve 1.1

Screen Sieve is a nifty tool for Mac OS X that lets you search the contents of the currently active window at any time. It highlights all occurrences of characters, words and phrases as you type, without requiring modifications to applications.

Putting Mac OS X built-in support for Accessibility to good use, Screen Sieve works with any application that supports the Accessibility APIs. Applications that do include Mail, Safari, Xcode and the Finder, as well as most other applications written in Cocoa and to some extent Carbon.

iTunes is an example of an application that doesnt properly support Accessibility.

There are two things that separates the way Screen Sieve lets you search for information from the way the Find command usually works:
• Screen Sieve highlights all the matches that are visible in a window, while Find usually just highlights a single match.
• Screen Sieve searches in the entire window, rather than only the areas containing text. That means that in addition to highlighting text, Screen Sieve may highlight objects like images, files, icons, buttons, and so on, as well.
• Screen Sieve doesnt force you to change context. When you invoke the Find command, your window frequently ends up scrolling up or down. This makes you lose track of where you are. Screen Sieve simply highlights the visible found matches, and ignores the rest until you decide to scroll further up or down.