While it’s been slow going, I’ve gotten a few new features put together in the ongoing development of version 6 of Default Folder X. I’m sharing two here because I’m very happy to have gotten them up and running, as I personally find them really useful.
Expanded Filename Editing Field
It seems like such a minor thing, but when you’re saving something like a web page that has a long name, it’s maddening that Save As dialogs have such a tiny edit box for the filename. The long name runs past the end of the edit field and you have to click and drag or use the arrow keys to get to the rest of it if you want to make any changes.
While it required way more juggling than I expected, Default Folder X 6 expands the filename field to a usable size.
Keyboard-based Access to Recent and Favorite Items
I’m personally a very keyboard-biased user. I’d rather use shortcuts and type than take my hand off the keyboard to click around with the mouse. As a result, Default Folder X has always had the ability to assign keyboard shortcuts to Favorites and to access recently used items. Up until now, however, that didn’t include just typing to select exactly what you wanted. In version 6, that’ll be an option:
I’ve used a “Sublime Text-style” selection method, where fuzzy matching gives you results that include file, folder and application names that contain the letters you’ve typed, even if there are some missing in between. It also favors capital letters and the first letters of words.
You’ll see that the top match in the image above when typing “roc” is “ReactiveObjC” because of the capitalized R, O and C in the correct order, with “ProcessController.m” further down the list even though it contains “roc” in lowercase. I’m still tweaking this, but I find the results pretty quick and intuitive when looking for something (though granted, the results lower down in the list tend to appear almost random until you look hard at them).
As a developer, the danger I see with this feature is that people will want me to reproduce all kinds of options from similar keyboard-based utilities like LaunchBar and Alfred and I’m not sure how far to go with that. This isn’t meant to replace those (I’m a long-time LaunchBar user myself), but some additional tweaks could be nice…
If you want to help test…
While these (and other) features are still in development and thus a bit rough around the edges, I’d welcome input if you’ve got some time to try them out and provide thoughtful feedback. Email DefaultFolderX@stclairsoft.com if you’re interested.
Version 5.5.2 of Default Folder X is available. It works on Apple’s recent macOS 11.1 Big Sur beta release.
Amusingly, the biggest problem on macOS 11.1 was the new version numbering scheme that Apple is using for Big Sur. Default Folder X checks the OS version and had always assumed that if the minor revision number (the ’15’ in 10.15.7, for example) changed, it was a major new OS release, because that’s the way it’s always been in the past. Big releases like going from Mojave (10.14) to Catalina (10.15) generally require significant testing and development to ensure compatibility, so it just disables itself and waits for me to finish a compatibility update.
So when Apple went from Big Sur 11.0.1 to Big Sur 11.1 beta (with a version number change that surprised a lot of us developers), Default Folder X said “Oh no, it’s a major OS release! I don’t know what to do, so I’ll just be safe and do nothing” and refused to even look at the Open and Save dialogs. So yeah, redoing the OS-version-checking logic and making a minor functional tweak was all that was actually necessary to get things working on 11.1.
In the process of testing Default Folder X on the Big Sur 11.1 beta, I did find a bug that could potentially cause file dialogs to lock up for what seems like an eternity (potentially as much as 2 minutes), so that’s also fixed in 5.5.2. Because of that, you should update if you’re running Big Sur, even if you’re not using 11.1.
Default Folder X 5.4.1 is now available. It fixes several issues that have been reported with macOS Catalina. A couple were simple bugs in Default Folder X itself:
Empty folders were not added to the Recent Folders menu
Items in the Utility menu were sometimes not enabled correctly
File dialog menu shortcuts were not working as advertised
Those issues have all been fixed. One other fix, however, is a bit bizarre. I figured I’d briefly talk about it in case other Mac users or developers encounter this:
In Catalina, the Finder must be running before you can approve apps to record the screen
In macOS 10.15, Default Folder X requests permission for Screen Recording (here’s why). If it doesn’t have permission, it tries to capture a portion of the screen, which causes Catalina to pop up an alert asking for your approval. Default Folder X then leads you through System Preferences to ok everything. It’s an annoying process, but works as well as can be expected given Catalina’s limitations. UNLESS you happen to also be a user of CocoaTech’s Path Finder app.
If you’re running Path Finder and have chosen to have Path Finder launch when you log in and have its preference set to quit the Finder after it launches, you’re in for a treat. If an app needs permission to record your screen, you will never see the prompt, and the app will not be added to System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Privacy > Screen Recording, so there’s no way for you to manually approve it there if you happen to realize it needs permission.
Based on testing that I and Ben Surtees at Surtees Studios (developer of the excellent Bartender app) have done, if the Finder isn’t running, the permissions system for Screen Recording just silently fails. Default Folder X, Bartender or whatever app needs permission doesn’t know this, and will continue prompting you to authorize them in System Preferences. Unfortunately, you have no way of approving them because there’s no way to manually add apps to the Screen Recording privacy panel, and if the Finder’s not running, the system doesn’t automatically add apps as it should.
As a developer, this seems pretty arbitrary – why would we need to have the Finder running in order to get permission for Screen Recording? But there you go – if you’re running into this, now you know why. As of version 5.4.1, Default Folder X will launch the Finder when necessary (and quit it afterwards) if it runs into this scenario. It’s a bit of a comical workaround, but hey, it gets you up and running without further pain.
The latest public beta of Default Folder X 5.4 is available, and offers improvements on both Catalina and older versions of macOS. Specifically, it adds support for the version of Path Finder distributed via SetApp, gives AppleScript developers access to applets and droplets in DFX’s Recent Files menu, and fixes a bug in Default Folder X’s handling of tabbed Finder windows.
To prepare, I wrote Go64, a free application that scans your system for 32-bit apps and shows them all in one place, with version and website information to make it easier to assess whether you need to update or look for an alternative.
After Mojave started warning about 32-bit apps needing to be updated, Ronald Leroux, who does all the French localizations of my software, pointed out that there wasn’t really a good way to check for and update 32-bit apps on your system. The built-in System Information app does work, but it’s certainly not the most user-friendly, nor is it necessarily complete.
Over a weekend last fall, I put together a straightforward little app to scan for 32-bit applications and show them in a list. It took a fairly simplistic approach, and worked fine but was no more thorough than what System Information provides. Still, it was much easier to use, so I figured I’d release it in the Mac App Store. Then came the task of trying to get it approved: App Store Review rejected it because it asked for permission for the entire disk so it could scan for apps. That wasn’t something I could fix or work around. So I shelved it – there were higher priorities at St. Clair Software, plus dealing with the App Store always seems to ruin my day.
Fast forward to WWDC 2019, when Apple confirmed that Catalina definitely won’t run 32-bit apps. Howard Oakley at the Eclectic Light Company had been doing some deep-digging and highlighted a number of issues with 32-bit app checking. He wrote his own exhaustive scanner that searches for them, but it’s slow and still not very user-friendly. I dusted off Go64 and figured I’d turn it into a more complete solution.
“It’ll only take a couple of days…” – famous last words uttered by nearly every software developer at some point in their careers.
As they say, the devil’s in the details, and dealing with the vagaries of what goes on inside applications got interesting. Go64 leverages Spotlight to compile a list of executables, but then does a deep dive into each 64-bit application to check for any helper apps, frameworks, services or plugins that might not be 64-bit. While I knew this could be an issue, Howard’s work highlighted just how common it is to have a mix of executables bundled within apps. Most of the time, it’s just for expediency, and developers do the proper juggling to run the correct one, but how’s a user to know? So Go64 does a bunch of checks to look for common methods, and if it still can’t make sense of things, errs on the safe side and flags the app with a little caution icon.
Clicking on “More Info” gives you the whole scoop:
This, of course, led to more complexity. As a developer, I don’t want to be bugged by hoards of people asking whether my app is Catalina-compatible just because some stupid “Go64” app noticed I include a 32-bit helper to deal with ancient Quicktime videos. So Go64 updates its internal “Ignore this warning” list periodically from the St. Clair Software website – that way it can inform users that even though the app contains 32-bit code, it’s compatible.
So developers, if your app contains 32-bit code but is Catalina-compatible, contact me with the bundle ID and version number of the app and I’ll add it to the list so Go64 gives users this message instead:
And to everyone else, I hope Go64 turns out to be useful for you. I certainly had a lot more 32-bit apps sitting on my Mac than I thought!
Version 5.3.7 of Default Folder X introduced a new capability: it can now ask what the default folder for an application should be on the fly using AppleScript. That may sound like a mouthful of jargon, so let me explain, because it can be applied in a lot of situations.
Jason Snell (of Six Colors and The Incomparable fame) has been writing about Macs forever, and is now a prolific podcaster. He emailed to ask if it would be possible to make Default Folder X more flexible. At that time, you could set a default folder for an application so that when you chose Save As, it always offered to save a file in that particular folder. His problem was that you have to set a single folder as the app’s default folder – just one.
Jason creates podcasts – lots of them. His reasoning was that if he could magically tell Default Folder X what podcast he was working on, it would always offer to save the component audio files into the folder for that podcast. Essentially: Wouldn’t it be great if you could edit an audio clip, hit Save, and have it automatically go into the folder for the current podcast folder? No re-configuring a default folder for each new project – it’d just work.
So he hit on this idea (which I think is just brilliant). He uses Apple’s Logic X application to create his podcasts. So for each podcast episode, there’s one master Logic X project file. To find the correct default folder for audio clips, all he has to do is look at all the project files and see which one has been saved most recently. The “Audio Files” folder sitting next to that project is where everything should go for the current project. He wrote an AppleScript to do this, which he shared on the Six Colors blog.
This can obviously translate to all sorts of different workflows. If you have one primary file for each project, it’s easy to tell which one you’re currently working on – it’s the one that’s been saved most recently.
How to set up an AppleScript to specify a default folder
So how do you wire up Default Folder X to do this? It’s pretty simple. Put an AppleScript script in:
or, if you want it to handle only a single application, put it in a sub-folder of the Scripts folder named for the application you want it to serve. To have it queried only for Preview, for example, put an AppleScript in:
The trick is that you need to implement this handler:
on getDefaultFolder(appName, dialogType, firstTime)
which returns the location of the default folder. Open up the sample script file in Script Editor (or your AppleScript editor of choice) and have a look. I’ve tried to explain things clearly in the comment at the top, and the script shows a number of different ways of returning folders to Default Folder X. And of course, you can also use Jason’s complete script as a starting point.
I think Jason’s idea is great – it streamlines work on multiple projects, but most importantly, it reduces the chance for error as you’re trying to meet that pressing deadline. I’d love to hear how others use this feature, so please drop me a line if it works for you too!
Brent Simmons has a great post over at inessential.com on the genius of Apple events. As one of the people behind the ground-breaking Userland Frontier, Brent is uniquely qualified to espouse on the significance and power of Apple events. Frontier, and later AppleScript, leveraged Apple events to let Mac users tie together applications to make workflows that got real things done, even when no single application existed that would do what they needed. I used Frontier for years to automate the back-end of my software business – it was invaluable.
As Brent says:
Picture Jane in her office. She gets an email from Bob every month with the latest WidgetX numbers. With that email in front of her, she double-clicks a script (or chooses one from a scripts menu)… [which] updates and saves (on a shared folder) a Keynote presentation with the new numbers.
This used to take hours, and it was prone to errors. Now it takes a minute or less — and it’s error-free
With Marzipan reportedly coming in macOS 10.15 this year, Apple is further de-emphasizing the cooperative nature of macOS apps, and will most likely not support Apple events in the “iPad apps adapted to run on the Mac” context of Marzipan. Again, from Brent:
What happens to Jane if Mail is a Marzipan app that doesn’t respond to Apple events?
Indeed.
And as Brent says (and as I detailed in an earlier post), many Mac apps use Apple events to directly integrate with other applications. They tie everything together for you, taking your Mac experience from ‘good’ to ‘great’. Just in my own apps, Default Folder X communicates this way with the Finder, Path Finder, ForkLift, Terminal and iTerm2 to give you seamless access to folders no matter where you need them. App Tamer uses Apple events to make sure it doesn’t interrupt iTunes and Spotify when they’re streaming music for you. And there are numerous other examples throughout the Mac ecosystem (and probably on your Mac right now).
Losing Apple event support in Mac applications would be a bigger loss than a lot of people realize – and one I’m not sure Apple is completely cognizant of. My hope is that there’s someone back there minding the proverbial store, but my feeling is that Apple is rushing headlong to open up macOS to UIKit applications to get more apps on the Mac, without regard for some important underpinnings.
Houdah Software released a major upgrade of their excellent Spotlight search utility, HoudahSpot 5, last week. Among a ton of useful new features, HoudahSpot now also integrates with Default Folder X, giving you a much more powerful way to search for files and folders in Open and Save dialogs.
Just select “Search with HoudahSpot” from Default Folder X’s Utility menu
When you’re in a file dialog, Default Folder X provides a menu command to quickly search the currently displayed folder in HoudahSpot. This gives you the flexibility to search by file type, tags, content, modification date, or any other parameter you can think of.
And use HoudahSpot’s “Default Folder X” menu to send a search result to a waiting file dialog
Once you’ve located the file you want in HoudahSpot, Control-click on that file and use the “Default Folder X” menu to finish the round trip and send it back to the waiting file dialog (in Preview, in this case).
I’m happy to have had the chance to collaborate with Pierre Bernard, HoudahSpot’s developer, on this workflow. It delivers more convenience and time-savings to all the folks that use both HoudahSpot and Default Folder X.
If you have ideas for similar connections between your favorite indie applications, let the developers know – many of us are very receptive to your suggestions. Default Folder X also integrates with ForkLift and Path Finder, for example, because lots of people asked for it!
So I learned an important lesson in user interface design: There are times when you DON’T want a consistent look and feel. The user-confusion resulting from my mistake in Default Folder X 5.3.3 necessitated the release of Default version 5.3.4 yesterday.
First a little background: Due to the increased Privacy controls in Mojave, when you first launch it, Default Folder X has to lead you through several steps to give it permission to access necessary information and API’s. It does so by opening System Preferences and presenting a couple of dialogs that provide steps that you need to follow. Easy, right? These are the dialogs from version 5.3.3.
See a problem there? Well, I didn’t, and neither did my testers. But the dialogs are very similar – same heading text, same buttons – the fine print is different and the Default Folder X icons are in different places, but they’re a lot alike. The first dialog pops up, and after you follow its instructions, it is automatically replaced by the second one. Because they look alike, a lot of people thought that the instructions hadn’t changed and that they were stuck, with no option but to hit the “Quit Without Authorizing” button. And send me a freakin’ email… I got lots of email.
So here are the fixed dialogs. Different overall look, different boldfaced heading, and different buttons. And an important lesson learned: People are busy, and are not necessarily giving your app 100% of their attention. Make sure that when the state changes, the change is noticeable to them. Especially when their only option if they don’t notice the change is to quit your app.
Sooo – get Default Folder X 5.3.4. In addition to the updated Privacy prompts, it contains several bug fixes. You can get it from the Default Folder X release page, where you’ll also find release notes describing the changes.
There’s a new public beta version of Default Folder X available – it’s Default Folder X 5.2.6b7.
You’ll want it if you’re running Mojave 18A384a or higher, as the new Mojave builds require “usage statements” built into applications as part of their privacy controls. Previous betas of Default Folder X didn’t have these, resulting in newer iterations of Mojave summarily killing it if it tries to access protected folders, like those containing your contacts or music.
This Default Folder X build also includes a bunch new dialogs to alert you when it hasn’t been given adequate access to things in System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Privacy. The biggest stumbling block is access to Automation — giving DFX permission to use AppleScript to talk to the Finder, Path Finder, ForkLift and System Preferences. DFX uses AppleScript to get lists of open windows and navigate to folders and files in Finder / Path Finder / ForkLift, as well as opening System Preferences to the right preference pane so you can update necessary settings.
While there’s definitely a need for Mojave’s increased security, it’s a bit piecemeal at present. I’d love it if Apple would provide developers with some sort of API to help inform users in one shot of everything that an application needs access to, and to help them configure that access conveniently. As it stands right now, you’ll encounter multiple alerts as you use Default Folder X — they pop up in the middle of whatever you’re doing when Default Folder X first tries to touch something that’s protected. They’re not terrible, but they interrupt what you’re doing and, as such, aren’t presented at a time when you’re likely to devote your full attention to the security choice you’re being asked to make. So be prepared for a few alerts when you first start using Default Folder X in Mojave — it’s now the price we pay for additional security.
Oh, and on top of all the security shenanigans, Default Folder X 5.2.6b7 also tracks your recently used files much more effectively, even if the Recent Items system in macOS misses them. Something I’m happy to have finally sorted out!
