Archive for March, 2015

Changing the columns shown in your file dialogs

Tuesday, March 31st, 2015

I haven’t seen this little Yosemite tidbit anywhere on the web and have had people request it as a feature in Default Folder X, so I know it’ll help at least a few folks out there.

In the Open and Save dialogs of Cocoa applications (Safari, Preview, Pages, etc) you can right-click on the column headers to get a popup menu to change which columns are displayed in all of your file dialogs.

Simply turn the checkboxes off and on by selecting items from the menu. Once you’ve got the columns you want, you can rearrange them by clicking on a particular column header and dragging it left or right.

As I said, the popup menu is only available in Cocoa applications, but the changes you make will take effect in all of your applications – even Carbon apps (like Chrome, Word, Excel, etc) that don’t have the popup menu.

Default Folder X : Making space for longer filenames

Friday, March 27th, 2015

Notice anything different about the “Save As” dialog below? I’ve highlighted part of it in red to give you a hint 🙂

The edit field for the filename is much wider than usual – you can actually see the entire (long) name that Safari supplied for me. I’ve gotten a lot of requests for this in the past, but haven’t been able to make it happen until now. If you’re interested in trying it out and giving me feedback, I’m busy testing it and could use your help.

The details:

  • This is a Yosemite-only feature at the moment
  • It’s only been tested with a handful of applications and needs more exercise
  • If it doesn’t work in some application, the results shouldn’t be awful – some UI items will just be misplaced

If you’d like to help out (or are just anxious to get your hands on this) you can download this pre-release version of Default Folder X:

http://www.stclairsoft.com/download/DefaultFolderX-4.7d6.dmg

Please send your feedback to DefaultFolderX@stclairsoft.com.

Thanks!

– Jon

App Tamer 2.0.5 offers a number of improvements and tweaks

Wednesday, March 25th, 2015

App Tamer 2.0.5 just dropped, fixing a compatibility glitch with Safari that could cause App Tamer to mis-manage full-screen Flash playback (among other things). There are also a host of smaller fixes that will improve your user experience, like better error messages, fixing permissions problems automatically, etc.

This version also explicitly offers to switch to a logarithmic cpu graph on 8- and 16-core Macs to increase the amount of detail you can typically see on the graph (science and tech nerds nod here, while everyone else says “what the heck is a logarithmic cpu graph?”).

What’s logarithmic graph good for?

Basically, it changes the vertical scale of the graph so that data toward the bottom of the graph is magnified, while the top of the graph is squeezed together. Since most of the activity on the cpu graph is down below 50% on 8- and 16-core Macs (because you’re rarely actually using all 8 or 16 cores), this lets you see more details that you care about.

In the screenshot of App Tamer’s logarithmic cpu graph to the right, each horizontal gray line on the graph represents a 10% increment. As you can see, the bottom 10% increment takes up half of the vertical space, the next 10% takes up 15% of the space, and so on, with each successive 10% increment taking a smaller amount of screen real estate. This magnifies the bottom end of the graph, where most of the activity happens on Macs with lots of cpu power.

You can toggle between a regular linear graph and the logarithmic one by control-clicking (or right-clicking) on the graph.  A little popup menu lets you choose which scale you want to use.

Back to your regularly scheduled program…

Sorry for the digression. You can see the full change history and download App Tamer 2.0.5 on the App Tamer Release Page.