There’s now a public beta of Default Folder X 4.0.1. You can download it, as well as see the full list of changes it incorporates, on the Beta Testing Page. In short, it’s faster, more stable, more convenient, and delivers the user interface changes that you’ve been asking for in your emails.

Wow! It’s been a long few weeks, and I’ve been buried by all of the feedback and follow-up to the Default Folder X 4.0 release. Reviewing all the happenings, some great stuff has been going on:

• Default Folder X 4.0 made it out into the world, as most of you already know. The reception has been overwhelmingly positive, and I’ve really enjoyed hearing from so many of you. Keep those comments and suggestions coming!
• Chuck Joiner over at MacVoices sat down for an audio chat with me. We talked about DFX, of course, but also the history of St. Clair Software and my approach to writing software.
• Matt Neuberg of TidBITS authored a great article about Default Folder X that talks about its features and the history and evolution of Open and Save dialogs. Regardless of whether you read this particular article, I recommend that you follow TidBITS – it’s a great source of insight, reviews, and commentary by Adam Engst and his very knowledgeable staff.
• Gene Steinberg of Mac Night Owl fame talked with me on his Tech Night Owl LIVE show about Default Folder X, Leopard, and interesting Mac tidbits and tech stuff.
• There have been more great blog mentions, reviews, and comments than I’ve been able to keep track of. I need to put together one of those marketing-hype pages with all of the positive stuff 🙂

Now, on to the future. First, aside from doing a few interviews and fielding lots of emails, I’ve been working on issues with 4.0. Here are things I’ve taken care of already:

• “Make Save dialogs automatically default to the current document’s folder” now works correctly with Photoshop.
• Rebound now correctly activates the automatically selected file so that keyboard navigation works without requiring a click in the Open dialog.
• Updated the DFX application in the Extras folder to be a universal binary.
• Fixed a problem with the path menu in Open and Save dialogs – in some cases, the hierarchical menus would not work. They do now.
• Fixed the installer so it automatically takes care of the “quarantine” feature in Leopard so you don’t see the “You downloaded this application from the Internet. Are you sure you want to run it?” warning over and over.
• Fixed handling of recursive Navigation Services calls so Default Folder X will work in very old Carbon applications like FileMaker Pro 5.
• Fixed menu fonts so that menus are always the right size when you turn on the “small menu fonts” option in the secret settings dialog.
• Only show Finder and Path Finder windows when the Finder or Path Finder isn’t hidden.

If you’re dying to get your hands on one of these fixes, there’s a prerelease build available here:

http://www.stclairsoft.com/download/DefaultFolderX-4.0.1d11.dmg

On my to-do list for the next few days (I’m all about lists today, aren’t I?):

• UI changes. Yes, I’ve heard those of you who’ve written to say you want less black, less translucency, and smaller UI elements.
• A QuickLook-like preview server for Tiger. DFX uses QuickTime to generate previews in Tiger, and that’s, shall we say, not working very well. QuickTime is too slow, uses too much memory, and crashes occasionally (if you’ve had any of these problems with DFX 4, it’s likely that QuickTime’s the root cause). So I’m moving the preview rendering into a separate process that will supply the preview images to DFX.

Now back to email and coding, so I can get my lists done… 🙂