I occasionally get reports of problems between Default Folder X and Adobe InDesign. One user has done some digging and found that InDesign has some pretty major, known problems with Leopard’s Navigation Services (NavServices is the part of OS X that provides the Open and Save As dialogs). You may get crashes in InDesign when running Leopard, regardless of whether you’re using Default Folder X or not, and unfortunately, they’re not things that I can fix in DFX. For more details, see:

• http://blogs.adobe.com/indesignchannel/2008/05/leopard_alert_1053_contains_fi.html#more
• http://indesignsecrets.com/leopard-1053-fixes-some-navigation-services-crashes.php
• http://indesignsecrets.com/indesign-cs3-vs-leopard-status-report.php

There are a couple of workarounds described in the blog comments. Tim Cole at Adobe has written up one in his recent blog post.  A better one has been posted by Craig Swanson at CreativeTechs.

Thanks to James Wondrack for tracking down this info.

Happy two-days-before-Thanksgiving! At least for those of you that live in the USA or for some reason share America’s penchant for excessive eating.

Here’s an update on new the look and feel for Default Folder X. Among many things, the buttons have lost their borders for better Leopard karma, fonts and alignment are correct now, and Scott’s been working his magic with the icon. Feature-wise, the previews are smoother, you can now see and change Finder labels in both Open and Save dialogs, and stuff just works like it should. There are also a lot of under-the-hood tweaks for Leopard. I’m happy with the features now and DFX 4 should be ready to roll after a couple more weeks of testing.

Speaking of which, I need a few more dedicated folks to nit-pick and test. If you’d like to get your mitts on a beta copy, drop me an email at betamacs@stclairsoft.com and let me know what kind of machine you’re using, whether you’re running Leopard or Tiger, and why I should listen to your opinions   Sorry folks, but we’ve got enough testers now - thanks to all the folks that volunteered to help!  The release will be next week (the week of December 10).

I’ll be heading out to Denver for the holiday, but toting my MacBook Pro as usual, so I’ll never be far from the net. Opinions, rants, and kudos are all welcome (I’m not saying I’ll heed the former, but if you’ve got valid criticisms, I’m never above changing my mind). And yeah, I actually do like turkey, and I really love the getting-together-with-family part of the holidays.

Oh yeah - and to reiterate my response to one of the comments in an earlier entry, if you buy Default Folder X 3.0.6 now, you get 4.0 for free. I’m not going to charge you an upgrade fee if you buy the software 2 weeks (or 2 months) before the new version’s released. That’s just mean.

A great article for developers: Exploring Leopard with DTrace.  And Matt Gemmell has a fantastic rundown of all the great new Leopard features and API’s in his Get rid of your code with Leopard.  I wish there were easier ways to use all of them without inexorably tying your software to 10.5, though. I’ve resorted to loading the QuickLook framework dynamically in DFX 4 so I can use it while still retaining Tiger compatibility, but that’s an easy case because there’s really only one API call I have to manually look up.  Weak linking helps (thanks Apple!) but I don’t have a good structure set up for integrating a more complex framework without a lot of painful code.  Anyone have any ideas out there?  And no, “force your users to upgrade to Leopard” is not a viable answer in my book.

I’m excited about the new look for Default Folder X! Here’s a quick screenshot. In addition to the HUD-style translucent gray, DFX 4 gives you a preview window that floats below Open dialogs, finally letting you look at a decent-sized file preview no matter which view of the Open dialog you’re in (list, icon, or column view). The preview also zooms open to a full-screen image if you click on it - handy if you need to see more detail to be sure which of those two, very-similar-looking PDF’s is actually the one you want. And yes, the preview window also has”Get Info” information, comments, and permissions too.

The preview images come from QuickLook if you’re running Leopard, and from QuickTime if you’re running Tiger. QuickLook is faster and offers previews of many more formats (like MS Office documents), but I’ll try to squeeze in some more preview formats for Tiger before I get DFX 4.0 out the door.

To all those who are wondering (and haven’t emailed yet) - yes, Default Folder X 3.0.6 is mostly compatible with Leopard. It’ll run fine, but there are a few wrinkles - mainly that it doesn’t work with 64-bit applications.  As far as I’m aware, that basically means it doesn’t work with Xcode - I don’t think there are any other 64-bit apps shipping yet (and yes, I know - if you’re a developer, Default Folder X not working in Xcode is still extremely annoying).

The good news is that I have a development build of Default Folder X 4 running in Leopard so I can get my own work done in Xcode.  This new, Leopard-savvy version will be seeing the light of day (or the glow of other users’ screens) soon.  The interface has been revamped, it uses QuickLook to generate nice previews that you can see even if you’re in ‘list mode’ in an Open dialog, and it fixes a few nigglety little things in Leopard.  Some screenshots are on the way…