I just posted a beta version of HistoryHound that addresses a bunch of issues, not the least of which are support for Safari 4 and Opera 10.

Yes, you can now search your history in Safari 4, but it oddly doesn’t sort the results by relevance and it’s difficult to get to the history display in the first place.  It still takes me longer to find something than it does in HistoryHound.  For those of us that search through our histories frequently or use multiple browsers (I use Safari, Firefox, and NetNewsWire myself) HistoryHound is still what I’d choose (no bias here, of course ).

At any rate, hop over to the HistoryHound Beta Testing page to get the details and download a copy.

Contextual menu plugins are dead in Snow Leopard, replaced by the revamped Services system.  A user recently contacted me because he wanted to replicate the “Move Items” contextual menu item he used to use in Leopard.  He had used Automator to create a service, but was having a few problems, namely that Default Folder X wasn’t available when he chose the destination folder.

This got me to open up Automator in Snow Leopard and take a crack at it myself.  In the process, I was reminded how cool Automator is :)  At any rate, here’s the automator script I put together:

So you’re obviously asking: Why go to the trouble of creating variables instead of just using the “Move Finder Items” action by itself?  I’m glad you asked!  The reason is that I want to bring up a file dialog to specify the folder where I want the items to go.  There’s not a clean way to have the “Move Finder Items” do that every time.  You can change its options to “Show this action when the workflow runs” but you still have to click on it every time you use it to ask it to show a file dialog.  If you use Default Folder X to enhance your Open dialogs, it’s faster to just have the dialog pop up and then go where you want to with DFX.

So in the image above, the workflow puts the current Finder selection into the “selection” variable.  Then it uses AppleScript to bring up a file dialog to ask for a folder, which it stores in the “path” variable.  And finally, it uses the Move Finder Items action to do the work.  Not too much more complicated, and it speeds up your workflow considerably if you’ve already got DFX installed so the Open dialogs are smart.

For you automator programmers, note that some of the actions shown in the workflow do not take inputs.  I did this by control-clicking on the action (”Get Value of Variable”, for example) and choosing “Ignore Input” from the contextual menu.  If you don’t do this, Automator will actually add the input from the previous step to the next one, which is definitely not what you want in this case.

Oh, and if you just want the automator workflow file so you can add it to your own system, you can download it here:

http://www.stclairsoft.com/download/MoveItems.zip

If you need more help with Automator and Services, Apple has some good information and tutorials here:

http://www.macosxautomation.com/services/learn/

(Once you’ve gotten through the first few steps of the tutorial, you should be able to just replicate the picture above to make the Move Items service yourself).

I just posted version 4.3.1 of Default Folder X.  It’s got fixes and improvements for users of Snow Leopard, Gmail, Final Cut Pro, and QuickTime.  It also makes Default Folder X’s contextual menus work in icon and column view in Open and Save dialogs (they were missing in Snow Leopard).

If you want the toolbar to be on the left side of the Open and Save dialog instead of the right, install version 4.3.1 and then Option-click on the “Settings” button in the preference pane and turn on “ToolbarOnLeft”.

There are also some UI fixes, including eliminating that annoying white box that would occasionally show up in the menubar where Default Folder X’s menu icon was supposed to be.

Thanks for everyone that reported problems and tested fixes for them.  If you have any issues or ideas, just email support@stclairsoft.com.

Matt Neuburg recommends Default Folder X in his new eBook “Take Control of Exploring & Customizing Snow Leopard”.  More importantly, Matt’s eBook and the companion “Take Control of Upgrading to Snow Leopard” offer great recommendations on safely upgrading to Snow Leopard, what’s new and interesting in the new OS revision, and how to get the most out of it.  I highly recommend them - I’ve learned some new stuff myself thanks to Take Control Ebooks.

Default Folder X 4.3 sports Snow Leopard compatibility and a number of other enhancements and fixes.  You can get it from the Default Folder X release page.

IMPORTANT: There’s a bug in older versions of Default Folder X that can cause crashes while you’re using the hierarchical path menu if you’re running Mac OS 10.6.  Make sure to install this update before you upgrade to Snow Leopard!

And now that we’ve got that dire warning out of the way, there are a couple of geeky little additions in this release that I’m partial to:

• You can globally set a minimum file dialog size and column width. Use these commands in terminal to set the values:

  defaults write com.stclairsoft.DefaultFolderX minimumSize.width 800

  defaults write com.stclairsoft.DefaultFolderX minimumSize.height 600

  defaults write com.stclairsoft.DefaultFolderX minimumSize.columnWidth 250

  Change the numbers at the end of the commands to the sizes you want to use (in pixels).

• You can list items in hierarchical menus chronologically rather than alphabetically by holding down the Control key.

Take a look at the release page for details about all of the changes.