Default Folder X 4.4 shipped this morning – finally! I’m very happy to have implemented some suggestions from Default Folder X users that add greatly to its capabilities:

1. Offline Favorites: Default Folder X now shows you favorite folders even when the disk they’re on is not available. If you click on one of them, the disk will be mounted if possible, and then the folder opened. This helps immensely if you do any work with file servers.

2. Preloading of Recent and Favorite folders: Default Folder X has to check to see whether folders are available and load their icons. Doing this ahead of time makes the menus drop down almost instantaneously.

3. Swipe left to go up a folder: Three finger swipe up or to the left to go up a folder – thanks for the suggestion Ben 🙂

And of course, there’s additional compatibility with Firefox 4, Chromium, Brother ControlCenter, Shimo and Neu; a new scripting verb; fixes for some pretty uncommon bugs (but important, nonetheless for the few people that encounter them!) and tweaks to hotkey handling.

Grab a copy from the Default Folder X Release page – the update is free for all registered version 4 users. One word of warning: If you downloaded a copy early this morning, go back and re-download and install it again. The first build that was posted (version 4.4(13515)) had some problems due to some Xcode funkiness. These were fixed in 4.4(13531).

Oh yeah – and it supports Lion too, though not fully yet. Sandboxed apps (TextEdit, Preview, and Safari’s plugin helper) don’t get Default Folder X with this release – that’s hopefully coming soon.