Archive for November, 2024

Default Folder X 6.1.2 – Sequoia fixes, better Finder labels and more

Monday, November 18th, 2024

A little over 2 weeks ago, version 6.1.1 of Default Folder X was released with a workaround for a bug in Sequoia. The macOS 15 Accessibility API partially fails under certain circumstances, so I resorted to using a window server SPI to provide some notifications that Default Folder X needs and was no longer getting from the Accessibility subsystem. Turns out that fix wasn’t perfect, and there were still situations where DFX wasn’t notified by the system. This resulted in various weird behaviors: Finder-click would stop working, the filename field in Save dialogs wouldn’t highlight correctly, you couldn’t Tab around in Save dialogs, DFX’s bezel wouldn’t always hide itself when a file dialog went away, and other odd, confused behavior.

After a fair amount of experimentation followed by exhaustive testing, Default Folder X 6.1.2 is ready, and corrects the problems on Sequoia. I strongly recommend that anyone using macOS 15 update to Default Folder X 6.1.2. You’re not going to lose data or anything like that if you keep using an older release, but you’ll run into annoying inconsistencies and bugs that are fixed now.

In more positive news, version 6.1.2 also includes a revamped framework for handling Finder labels. The little color bubbles are back in Default Folder X’s menus and are correct even if you’ve changed them in your Finder settings. And the Information pane shows the correct label despite iCloud doing its best to screw things up.

This release is also proactive about detecting problems caused by BetterMouse, a popular app for tweaking and enhancing your mouse. BetterMouse’s “click-through” feature changes how windows are activated in macOS, and this results in Default Folder X’s toolbar hiding itself as soon as you click on it. Not very helpful if you clicked there to use one of DFX’s menus. If that happens, you’ll see an alert with instructions to turn off click-through. Incidentally, you can also add Default Folder X to BetterMouse’s exception list and then change the click-through setting only for DFX, but that much detail is too much to fit in a tiny little alert window.

A couple of other infrequently-encountered bugs have been fixed in version 6.1.2, too, and the search results in Quick Search are now sorted with more priority on what’s been used most recently.

As always, if you’re already running Default Folder X, just choose “Check for Update” from its menu in your menu bar to see the release notes and install the new version. If you’d rather check out the release notes here and update manually, head to the Default Folder X Release page for all the details.

Default Folder X 6.1.1 improves Quick Search and other features, fixes issues with Sequoia

Friday, November 1st, 2024

A free update is available for Default Folder X 6, adding improvements to existing features and fixing a bunch of issues that have come to light since the release of macOS 15 Sequoia.

Feature Enhancements

Quick Search: The Quick Search keyboard shortcut can now be used to both show and hide the Quick Search window – a minor detail that’s actually very convenient. And when you perform a search, the priority of matching sequential characters is now higher than matching capital letters. This makes the ranking of search results more intuitive. Displaying your Quick Search results is also a little gentler on the CPU – it doesn’t madly try to generate all of the preview icons it needs all at once.

Reveal in File Dialogs: You can now reveal items in file dialogs by holding down the Command key while choosing an item from one of Default Folder X’s menus. This is handy, for example, when you want to open a file that’s in the same folder as one of the files in your Recent Files menu. Command-selecting that file will switch the file dialog to the folder that contains it.

Finder Labels: The Label menu in Default Folder X’s Information panel is now customized with your favorite labels as defined in your Finder settings, rather than showing the system’s 7 default colors. It will also correctly show the label assigned to files stored on iCloud, even though iCloud mucks with the Finder attributes and sets the stored label to “gray” for all files saved to or moved to iCloud.

Bug Fixes

Format Menu: Sequoia contains a redesigned Save As dialog that optionally puts the file format near the top of the dialog, just below the filename. This could confuse Default Folder X 6.1 – it would replace the format menu with its customized path menu, rather than replacing the system-supplied path menu like it’s supposed to. Version 6.1.1 no longer gets confused when that redesigned dialog shows up in TextEdit, Bean, Skim or any other app that uses it.

Sequoia Accessibility Bug: A much bigger issue has been a bug in Sequoia that causes part of the system’s Accessibility API to fail when multiple apps are using it. We’ve found that running either uBar or SideBar stops Sequoia from informing Default Folder X when UI elements are destroyed. This results in DFX’s controls in file dialogs failing to update; its Finder Windows menu and Finder-click feature show windows that are no longer there; and various processes within DFX fail unexpectedly. It basically just gets confused – sometimes really confused. Thanks to help from Oliver Tuerk, developer of Sidebar, and code from Åsmund Vikane, developer of Yabai, I’ve put together a workaround that allows Default Folder X to function correctly even when Sequoia doesn’t.

Finder Toolbar Buttons: Sequoia brought a minor change to the Finder’s preference file contents that could result in Default Folder X resetting the positions of its buttons in your Finder toolbar after you’ve manually rearranged them. Sorry about that – I know it’s annoying and maddening for you folks that take the time to make your Mac setup perfect. Anyway, Default Folder X deals with it now – and in the process I was surprised to run into Classic Mac OS style alias records in the Finder prefs. I had to break out a bunch of deprecated Carbon API calls to resolve those aliases 😳

Miscellaneous Other Stuff: There are also fixes for Default Folder X’s drawer not working correctly in certain Stage Manager configurations and a few graphical glitches.

More Info

As usual, there are release notes and download links on the What’s New page. Or if you’re running Default Folder X on your Mac already, just select “Check for Update” from its menu in your menu bar. You’ll get the release notes and a button to automatically download and install version 6.1.1. Thanks for using and continuing to support Default Folder X!