Here’s the 4.2.1b2 build of Default Folder X:

http://www.stclairsoft.com/download/DefaultFolderX-4.2.1b2.dmg

The new menu preview feature now has an on / off switch in the preferences window, and due to popular demand the small sized previews have increased to 192 x 192 (instead of 128 x 128).  The zoom-when-you-pause feature now works reliably on all systems, and this build works correctly under Mac OS 10.4.  Please download it and give it a spin!

Send any bug reports, impressions, and feature requests to defaultfolder@stclairsoft.com.  Here’s the full 4.2.1 change history from the ReadMe:

• Default Folder X now gives you file previews in its menus.  As you mouse through Default Folder X’s hierarchical menus from the menu bar, you’ll see a preview of the file that’s highlighted in the menu.  Hover there for a couple of seconds and the preview will enlarge.
• In Open and Save As dialogs, Default Folder X now puts a “Computer” item at the top of the folder hierarchy in the path menu.
• New Spotlight tags were sometimes not written out to the shared OpenMeta recent tag list.  This has been fixed.
• Spotlight tag completion now ignores differences in diacritical marks.
• Added support for Fluid site-specific browsers when they’re running as menu extras.
• Previews now correctly follow aliases so that a preview of the original file is shown when you select an alias in an Open dialog.
• When two folders with the same name are in a menu, the menu items for them will now include the name of the parent folders that uniquely identify those folders (Default Folder X used to just show their immediate parent folders, but sometimes those had the same names too).
• Fixed an AppleScript problem that would cause Preview to print a PDF file over and over again if you selected a the file in the Finder and chose Print from the File menu.
• Changed the rebound feature so that filenames with a ‘:’ character are recognized correctly in Cocoa applications.
• Corrected a problem that would result in Default Folder X not loading in multiple running applications that had the same creator signature (when running both Photoshop CS3 and CS4 at the same time, for instance).
• Default Folder X was saving empty Finder comments, resulting in Spotlight attaching empty com.apple.metadata:kMDItemFinderComment attributes to some files.  This has been fixed.
• Fixed compatibility problems with python-based applications that use appscript.
• Added support for 64-bit PowerPC applications to the scripting addition.
• Corrected inconsistent rebound behavior on network server drives.
• Fixed the Extras/DFX script so it doesn’t show a busy cursor when it pops up the Default Folder X menu.

Thanks!

So I rolled a new preview method into Default Folder X’s system-wide menus in the menubar.  Now, not only can you browse all of your files and folders through its quick hierarchical menus, but you can see file previews in little bubbles, like this:

And if you hover over the menu item for a few seconds, that little preview will expand into a large one so you can see more details.  Just browsing my hard disk with this has turned up ton of images and documents I didn’t know I still had!

This and a slew of other improvements are in the first beta release of Default Folder X 4.2.1.  You can download a copy here to try it out:

http://www.stclairsoft.com/download/DefaultFolderX-4.2.1b1.dmg

There’s a full change log in the Beta Read Me file, and usual disclaimers about it being a prerelease version apply (it may have bugs, etc).  I’d love to get some feedback on both the menu item previews and the other improvements, so grab a copy, give it a try, and let me know your thoughts!

- Jon

Default Folder X 4.2 shipped today! It delivers support for OpenMeta tagging, improved Rebound behavior, a new AppleScript command, and compatibility with the latest developer build of Snow Leopard.  Full details are on the release page.  Also check out the list of OpenMeta compatible applications at the bottom of the page.

Oh, and something that’s not mentioned in the release notes: As a side effect of some changes I made for Snow Leopard, DFX now loads in Java applications.

Thanks to everyone for the great feedback, testing help, and suggestions.  As always, your input is what helps make Default Folder X such a great tool for all of us!

I’m very excited about Ironic Software’s establishment of OpenMeta, a new standard for storage of tag metadata on OS X.  Storing spotlight keywords in the Finder/Spotlight comments of files has always been problematic, but up until now, it was the best solution available if you wanted general-purpose access to the tags via Spotlight.

Now OpenMeta uses the metadata capabilities in HFS+ to uniformly store tag information - and provides open source code to make it easy for developers get on board.  Ironic’s Deep application uses it, and Gravity Applications’ new Tags app is doing it too - you can assign tags to files, email messages, photos - it’s very slick and oh-so-much-better on a technical level - we just have to get more people to adopt it!  As always, one of the missing pieces is being able to tag documents as you’re saving them - Default Folder X already supports this using the traditional Spotlight comments, so it makes all the sense in the world for DFX to support OpenMeta.

So in answer to all the emails I’ve been getting - YES, Default Folder X will adopt the OpenMeta standard (while still supporting Spotlight comments too, for those of you that aren’t ready to switch).

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.