Archive for June, 2008

Popping up the Default Folder X menu with a hotkey

Monday, June 16th, 2008

Adam Aaron asked if I could make DFX pop up its menu under the mouse when he pressed a certain key combination. You can actually do this now with a simple AppleScript and one of the numerous macro utilities out there (Adam used QuickSilver to make it work on his machine).

First, write a little AppleScript like so:

tell application "Default Folder X"
ShowMenu
end tell

Then have your macro utility of choice (QuickSilver, iKey, QuicKeys, or whatever) run the script when you hit your favorite key combination, and there you go 🙂

(Note: If you’re running Default Folder X with its “Show icons and menus in the Dock” setting turned off, the application target in the AppleScript should be “Default Folder X Helper” instead).

HistoryHound 1.9.5d4 searches FAST

Saturday, June 7th, 2008

I’ve posted a pre-release version of HistoryHound. It now runs very smoothly and searches VERY quickly on Leopard. It’s also got options to constrain searches by date so I can, for instance, search for only the web pages I’ve visited in the last 4 days that included the words “iphone sdk”. It helps immensely in tracking down stuff you’re looking for in your browser history.

There’s also a new contextual menu that you can use to remove search results from the index or create a filter to prevent HistoryHound from indexing any further URLs that are similar to the one in your search results. And of course, there are some bug fixes and minor improvements in various places, but the big deal is just how fast it actually searches now.

And yes, I do know that Safari now has its own search field when you view your history, but it’s clunky to get to and doesn’t allow me to constrain my searches by date. Nor does it see any of the pages that I’ve visited in FireFox like HistoryHound does.

Anyway, I’m happy to have HistoryHound running about ten times faster now. Grab a copy and give it a try yourself!

Jon on MacJury

Thursday, June 5th, 2008

I had MacJury duty Tuesday on Chuck Joiner’s MacJury show, contributing to a discussion on stolen Macs and the hilarious Back to My Mac recovery of a stolen laptop. We also talked about Starbucks’ new WiFi rollout and speculated on their possible plans as a “media hub cafe”. Check out our random ramblings 🙂

Troubles with InDesign’s Open and Save dialogs

Thursday, June 5th, 2008

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:

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.

Default Folder X 4.0.6 Available

Thursday, June 5th, 2008

A new version of DFX is now finished and up on the web site (the Japanese installer should be coming later today).  Version 4.0.6 contains a bunch of compatibility fixes for various applications that do things in slightly nonstandard ways that would confuse Default Folder X.

I’ve also added a little code to try and make column view more tolerable in Open and Save dialogs.  Default Folder X will now set the default size for columns based on the size of the rightmost column in the last Open or Save dialog you used (not the preview column, but the rightmost column containing a list of files and folders).  I know this is still a little “clunky” – it’d be great if I could save and restore the various widths you’ve set for all the columns, or auto-size them to fit the actual contents of the column – but there are limitations in Leopard’s Open and Save dialogs that make those impossible or impractical.  So, this change makes it better than it was, but still not as I want it.