Posts Tagged ‘houdahspot’

Default Folder X’s cooperation with HoudahSpot 5

Monday, April 8th, 2019

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!

And if you haven’t tried HoudahSpot yet, go download a free demo copy now and check it out. You’ll be glad you did!

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Posted in Default Folder X, Development, HoudahSpot, Mac Community, Tips | 1 Comment »

Default Folder X 5.3.5 improves support for HoudahSpot, LaunchBar, CopyPaste Pro and Mojave

Wednesday, March 13th, 2019

While there isn’t a giant “marquee feature” in this release, version 5.3.5 of Default Folder X delivers a long list of improvements.

‘Search with HoudahSpot’ in the Utility menu

In terms of new functionality, users of HoudahSpot (and those of you that don’t use it and should go try it now) will be happy to see that you can start a search directly from an Open or Save dialog. This helps overcome the weak search functionality that macOS offers by default in file dialogs. And with the upcoming release of HoudahSpot 5, you’ll be able to make “round-trip” searches, sending results back to the waiting file dialog after you’ve found what you want.

You can save screenshots to any folder you want using Mojave’s screenshot tool

Compatibility fixes for LaunchBar and CopyPaste Pro are also in version 5.3.5, as well as a fix so that Default Folder X works in the Save dialogs used by Mojave’s new screenshot utility. The latter was an interesting (and understandable) situation: Mojave’s screen capture app basically covers the entire screen with a big, semi-transparent window to let you rubber-band select an area and whatnot. If you then choose “Other Location…” to select a folder, the attendant file dialog has to come up on top of the giant window so you can use it. Since the big window is covering everything else, including Default Folder X, DFX didn’t work because mouse and keyboard clicks couldn’t get through. It just wasn’t something I’d planned for – so now I have 🙂

Version 5.3.5 also offers a bunch of improvements for Default Folder X’s drawer in the Finder, fixes for bugs involving its selection of recent files and folders in Open and Save dialogs, a problem with file dialog sheets when they’re the full width of the screen, and issues with some many-button mice.

Oh, and the secret settings dialog now lets you turn on “view-matching” for the Finder-click feature, making Default Folder X apply whatever view mode (Icon / List / Column) is used in the Finder window to the file dialog. And you can specify a minimum width and height for file dialogs, preventing them from coming up in a uselessly-small default size. Hold down the Option key while choosing Preferences from Default Folder X’s menu to get there.

As usual, the change history and download links are available on the Default Folder X Release Page. Go get it!

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Posted in Default Folder X, Mojave | 3 Comments »