Well, I’m a day late but want to share some details on the changes in the new version of Default Folder X that was released yesterday.

First, the Bug Fixes

1. The last release of Default Folder X (6.1.2) used the macOS windowserver SPI to work around a very problematic bug in Apple’s Accessibility API in Sequoia, and that turned out to be a bit touchy. Since the SPI is officially undocumented, I should’ve been even more paranoid than I was when using it. DFX wasn’t checking the size of the argument returned by some notifications, and that caused a crash in rare circumstances.

2. The improved management of Finder labels in DFX 6.1.2 wasn’t always improved. If your Finder settings lacked a list of favorite tags (or the list contained fewer than the standard 7 tags), Default Folder X would unexpectedly quit. This only affected a few people, as you had to have some pretty messed up Finder prefs for it to occur, but resulted in DFX crashing every time you used an Open dialog. My apologies – it’s fixed in version 6.1.3.

3. In Sequoia, the “Do you want to keep this new document?” Save dialogs optionally contain a popup menu for the file’s format. This confused Default Folder X, resulting in it not putting its toolbar up when it should have. That’s been corrected, so DFX will now enhance Save dialogs when apps offer a format popup (TextEdit is the only one I’m aware of at present).

4. In the process of chasing down the problems above, I also cleaned up several other bugs and sped up the construction of Default Folder X’s hierarchical menus.

I’m sorry about all that – version 6.1.2 was a bit substandard.

New Things

I did manage to actually make a couple of useful additions while chasing down bugs:

1. Quick Search can now be invoked using AppleScript or a custom URL. This is primarily useful for folks who want to access it from a keyboard macro app like Keyboard Maestro or using a launcher / shortcut utility like Raycast or Alfred. Look up the details in Default Folder X’s AppleScript dictionary, or use an URL like:

     defaultfolderx://quicksearch?SearchString

(yes, you can click on that URL if you’re already running Default Folder X 6.1.3).

2. Default Folder X does a better job of tracking recent Microsoft Word documents that are stored on OneDrive. The underlying problem is interesting: Even though your files are stored locally on your Mac, Word internally keeps track of files on OneDrive using a network URL like https://d.docs.live.net/48c889/OneDriveTest.docx. That makes sense, since the “true source” of the document is on OneDrive – the file on your Mac is just a synchronized copy of it. So Default Folder X has to translate that URL into the location of the local file on your Mac in order to use it. It’s been doing that for a while, but there are some interesting twists and turns if it’s actually stored on SharePoint, Microsoft’s corporate version of OneDrive. DFX 6.1.3 now navigates that little SharePoint maze correctly.

Please Update to Default Folder X 6.1.3

So – regardless of whether those two new things matter to you, please grab the Default Folder X 6.1.3 update to get the bug fixes. You can select “Check for Update” from Default Folder X’s menu in your menu bar, or get more details and download it from the Default Folder X What’s New page.