Archive for June, 2021

Default Folder X 5.6b1 brings its enhancements to Monterey

Friday, June 25th, 2021

It’s June, which means Apple has begun rolling out test builds of the next version of macOS, dubbed macOS 12 Monterey. And that means we’ve got a public beta version of Default Folder X available, bringing Default Folder X’s file and folder organization chops to the new OS.

And if you’re not running Monterey yet, version 5.6b1 still addresses some issues with Affinity Designer and other Affinity apps, Photoshop’s “Export As” dialog, and Google Drive.

Don’t let your Open and Save dialogs go naked in Monterey – head on over to the Default Folder X beta testing page for details and a download link!

App Tamer 2.6.3: Better efficiency and compatibility

Monday, June 21st, 2021

Version 2.6.3 of App Tamer improves its own efficiency, as well as addressing a few issues that have been brought up by users. When collecting and managing CPU statistics of the processes running on your Mac, App Tamer now uses two additional strategies to reduce its own processor usage. And on Apple Silicon-powered M1 Macs, its helper application (which is in charge of managing the CPU usage of other apps) schedules its work on the M1’s “efficiency cores”, which use less power than the CPU’s “performance cores”.

On top of that, several bugs and user interface issues were corrected to prevent settings for critical processes from being changed to values you really don’t want (trust me 😁), and fixing a rare issue with Amazon Photos.

The full release notes and download links are on the App Tamer Release Page.

Default Folder X: Opening folders in Path Finder vs. Finder

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2021

With the recent focus on Default Folder X’s integration with Path Finder, I’ve been fielding a number of questions about how to make Default Folder X open folders in Path Finder instead of the Finder.

Using Path Finder instead of the Finder for all apps

The first, simplest answer is that Default Folder X uses your “default file browser” when opening folders. If you set your default file browser to be Path Finder, selecting a folder from Default Folder X’s menus will open it in Path Finder. This will also make all other apps on your Mac use Path Finder for their “Reveal in Finder” commands.

“But how the heck do I set Path Finder as my default file browser?” you say. Well, I’m glad you asked! It’s easy – there’s a setting in your Path Finder preferences:

Turn on this checkbox and you’re done.

Using Path Finder instead of the Finder – but just for Default Folder X

If you’d rather make this apply only to Default Folder X, you can set Default Folder X’s “fileViewer” preference in Terminal with this command:

defaults write com.stclairsoft.DefaultFolderX5 fileViewer com.cocoatech.PathFinder

Note that if you’re using the Setapp version of Path Finder, you should replace ‘com.cocoatech.PathFinder’ with ‘com.cocoatech.PathFinder-setapp’. To tell Default Folder X to go back to using the Finder instead of Path Finder, just replace ‘com.cocoatech.PathFinder’ with ‘com.apple.finder’.

Toggling between Path Finder and Finder on the fly

And finally, if you want to get really fancy and sometimes have Default Folder X open folders in the Finder and sometimes in Path Finder, you can set up an AppleScript to toggle back and forth. Attaching a script like this to a keyboard shortcut using Peter Lewis’ amazing Keyboard Maestro app makes it super-easy:

-- set the 'currentViewer' variable to the current fileViewer setting
set currentViewer to do shell script "defaults read com.stclairsoft.DefaultFolderX5 fileViewer"
-- now switch to whichever fileViewer is currently not in use
if currentViewer is "com.apple.finder" then
do shell script "defaults write com.stclairsoft.DefaultFolderX5 fileViewer com.cocoatech.PathFinder"
else
do shell script "defaults write com.stclairsoft.DefaultFolderX5 fileViewer com.apple.finder"
end if