Archive for September, 2021

Default Folder X 6 development update

Friday, September 10th, 2021

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.

Default Folder X 5.6b4 provides fixes on all macOS versions

Friday, September 10th, 2021

Default Folder X 5.6b4 is now available. It’s a public beta release that adds compatibility with Apple’s latest macOS 12 Monterey betas, but also fixes issues on earlier versions of macOS as well.

The most important change is for users of 5.6b3, the previous beta release. That version would hang for 10 seconds or more (sometimes a lot more) after you resized a file dialog. That’s fixed in b4.

Other changes include a fix for instances where a top-level folder in Google Drive would get its “hidden” flag set by a bug (or feature?) in Google Drive, resulting in Default Folder X hiding folders or files within that folder in the Recent Folders and Recent Files history. Now Default Folder X just ignores that hidden flag. And I’ve added support for the Mac App Store version of PDF Studio Pro, an app DFX was refusing to enhance because it’s written in Java, and Java apps can sometimes crash because they don’t properly support the macOS Accessibility API.

As always, details and download links are on the Default Folder X Testing page. Note that the change history there includes a list of all the changes made since the last full release (version 5.5.9), if you haven’t been keeping up with previous beta releases.