Default Folder X earned a spot in AppleInsider’s list of Top 5 Utilities that Every New Mac User Needs!
Thanks to the folks at AppleInsider, and we couldn’t agree more, especially with their picks of TextExpander, Hazel and Keyboard Maestro too!
Archive for July, 2018
AppleInsider agrees: Default Folder X is a must-have!
Thursday, July 19th, 2018App Tamer 2.4 hides idle apps, makes its CPU usage graph optional, and more!
Wednesday, July 18th, 2018
App Tamer 2.4 is now available. It offers a new option to hide applications after they’ve been idle, and also lets you hide its CPU usage graph if you just want to see its lists of CPU-consuming processes. There are also fixes for several bugs, including one that could result in App Tamer not correctly slowing (or un-slowing) an app if you had the “Do not slow or stop apps if power is plugged in” option turned on.
As an additional note, App Tamer works with beta versions of Mojave, but it doesn’t yet support Dark Mode. However, you can switch App Tamer to its own dark appearance and that makes its main window match, at least.
A complete list of changes and a download link are on the App Tamer release page, or if you’re already running App Tamer, you can just choose “Check for Updates” from the menu in the lower right corner of its window.
Getting rid of the DropBox QuickLook plugin
Tuesday, July 17th, 2018I got an email from a customer yesterday telling me that Default Folder X had stopped displaying preview images of his new-format Microsoft Office documents. It still worked for the older formats like doc, xls and ppt files, but not docx, xlsx and pptx. Because Default Folder X uses QuickLook to generate the big previews it shows below file dialogs, we did a little poking around on his Mac to figure out what was going wrong with QuickLook.
It turns out that a new beta of DropBox (version 54.3.86) installs its own QuickLook generator plugin that overrides the system-supplied plugin for generating a number of file and image formats – including those MS Office files. OK, fine – just delete it, right? That worked until he restarted his Mac, then DropBox launched at login and promptly (and silently) reinstalled its QuickLook plugin again. I guess it knows what’s best for us, eh?
After a little thought, we arrived at this solution:
- Delete the DropBox QuickLook generator plugin
- Create an empty file at that location to prevent DropBox from reinstalling it
Fortunately, QuickLook is smart enough to realize that an empty file isn’t going to help it generate previews, and just defaults back to the other plugins it has. Problem solved!
The easiest way to do this is to open Terminal and execute these three commands:
rm -r ~/Library/QuickLook/DropboxQL.qlgenerator touch ~/Library/QuickLook/DropboxQL.qlgenerator qlmanage -r
A nice simple solution once you get it figured out. I imagine this is one of those problems that’s going to crop up for a lot of people, but isn’t quite obnoxious enough to get them to hunt down a solution. So there you go 🙂
You need Default Folder X 5.2.6b1 for Mojave developer b4 / public b3
Tuesday, July 17th, 2018
Well, I had hopes that the file dialog implementation in Mojave wouldn’t change and you could just keep running Default Folder X 5.2.5 until I finished support for Dark Mode, but Apple had other plans.
Yesterday’s beta release of Mojave changed the file dialogs ever so slightly – just enough for Default Folder X 5.2.5 to say “that looks sorta like a file dialog, but not exactly” and refuse to put up its controls around Open and Save dialogs. So if you’re running the latest Mojave build, you’ll need to visit the Default Folder X beta testing page and download the latest beta build of Default Folder X.
Sorry for the inconvenience, but you know how it is – “moving target” and all that.
