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January 24th, 2008
OK, so there’s a (very) vocal minority that really don’t like (some have even used the word “hate”) the black HUD windows in Default Folder X 4. For you folks, here’s the solution in a pre-release build:
http://www.stclairsoft.com/download/DefaultFolderX-4.0.1d16.dmg
http://www.stclairsoft.com/download/DefaultFolderX-4.0.1b1.dmg
And a picture of what it looks like:
To get this appearance, select “Gray sidebar” in the Options tab of the preferences:
The previews are also created much faster, and with much less overhead. This is especially pronounced on Tiger, where DFX doesn’t have QuickLook at its disposal and has to generate previews with QuickTime, WebKit, and regular text rendering. If you have any performance or stability complaints about version 4.0, please grab this build, give it a try, and fire off an email if you still have issues.
Tags: Default Folder X, Development, Interface, Performance, Speed, UI
Posted in Default Folder X, Development | 2 Comments »
January 24th, 2008
A great review of DFX 4 at PlanetQuark.com, complete with a laundry list of features. Folks seem to either love or hate the new UI (these guys are on the “love” side, I think). Which brings me to my next post….
Tags: Default Folder X, review
Posted in Default Folder X | No Comments »
January 8th, 2008
Wow! It’s been a long few weeks, and I’ve been buried by all of the feedback and follow-up to the Default Folder X 4.0 release. Reviewing all the happenings, some great stuff has been going on:
- Default Folder X 4.0 made it out into the world, as most of you already know. The reception has been overwhelmingly positive, and I’ve really enjoyed hearing from so many of you. Keep those comments and suggestions coming!
- Chuck Joiner over at MacVoices sat down for an audio chat with me. We talked about DFX, of course, but also the history of St. Clair Software and my approach to writing software.
- Matt Neuberg of TidBITS authored a great article about Default Folder X that talks about its features and the history and evolution of Open and Save dialogs. Regardless of whether you read this particular article, I recommend that you follow TidBITS – it’s a great source of insight, reviews, and commentary by Adam Engst and his very knowledgeable staff.
- Gene Steinberg of Mac Night Owl fame talked with me on his Tech Night Owl LIVE show about Default Folder X, Leopard, and interesting Mac tidbits and tech stuff.
- There have been more great blog mentions, reviews, and comments than I’ve been able to keep track of. I need to put together one of those marketing-hype pages with all of the positive stuff 🙂
Now, on to the future. First, aside from doing a few interviews and fielding lots of emails, I’ve been working on issues with 4.0. Here are things I’ve taken care of already:
- “Make Save dialogs automatically default to the current document’s folder” now works correctly with Photoshop.
- Rebound now correctly activates the automatically selected file so that keyboard navigation works without requiring a click in the Open dialog.
- Updated the DFX application in the Extras folder to be a universal binary.
- Fixed a problem with the path menu in Open and Save dialogs – in some cases, the hierarchical menus would not work. They do now.
- Fixed the installer so it automatically takes care of the “quarantine” feature in Leopard so you don’t see the “You downloaded this application from the Internet. Are you sure you want to run it?” warning over and over.
- Fixed handling of recursive Navigation Services calls so Default Folder X will work in very old Carbon applications like FileMaker Pro 5.
- Fixed menu fonts so that menus are always the right size when you turn on the “small menu fonts” option in the secret settings dialog.
- Only show Finder and Path Finder windows when the Finder or Path Finder isn’t hidden.
If you’re dying to get your hands on one of these fixes, there’s a prerelease build available here:
http://www.stclairsoft.com/download/DefaultFolderX-4.0.1d11.dmg
On my to-do list for the next few days (I’m all about lists today, aren’t I?):
- UI changes. Yes, I’ve heard those of you who’ve written to say you want less black, less translucency, and smaller UI elements.
- A QuickLook-like preview server for Tiger. DFX uses QuickTime to generate previews in Tiger, and that’s, shall we say, not working very well. QuickTime is too slow, uses too much memory, and crashes occasionally (if you’ve had any of these problems with DFX 4, it’s likely that QuickTime’s the root cause). So I’m moving the preview rendering into a separate process that will supply the preview images to DFX.
Now back to email and coding, so I can get my lists done… 🙂
Posted in Default Folder X, Development | No Comments »
December 8th, 2007
We’re getting a lot of questions, so to answer what seems to be on many people’s minds:
- If you purchase or upgrade to Default Folder X 3.0.6 now, the upgrade to version 4 will be free.
- If you purchased or upgraded Default Folder X any time on or after June 1, 2007, the upgrade to version 4 will be free.
- Upgrade pricing for other Default Folder X users will be $14.95. Again, if you upgrade now, your serial number will work with both DFX 3.0.6 and 4.0.
- Upgrade pricing for those who are using the really old OS 9 version of Default Folder will be $19.95.
Hope that helps!
Posted in Default Folder X | 3 Comments »
December 7th, 2007
Dan Frakes, a senior editor over at Macworld.com, just finished a really nice video preview of DFX 4: First look at Default Folder X 4. He does a great job of highlighting both the old and new features, and demos one of his old favorites, Finder-click.
I’m impressed (and very happy) with the quality of the video, Dan’s narration, and the overall coverage. If you’re wondering what Default Folder X has to offer, hop over and take a peek at the H.264 video, or subscribe to the video podcast via iTunes.
Thanks Dan!
P.S. There’s also a post by Ian Beck over at TagaMac with a reminder about DFX’s ability to set Spotlight tags – something that makes life so much saner for you tagging folks!
Posted in Default Folder X | 10 Comments »
December 6th, 2007
I was a little surprised that I couldn’t find this online anywhere, so for others that may need it, here’s a function that gets the effective owner of a Mac OS X process, given the process pid:
uid_t OwnerForPID(int pid)
{
struct kinfo_proc info;
size_t length = sizeof(struct kinfo_proc);
int mib[4] = { CTL_KERN, KERN_PROC, KERN_PROC_PID, pid };
if (sysctl(mib, 4, &info, &length, NULL, 0) < 0)
return kProcessValueUnknown;
if (length == 0)
return kProcessValueUnknown;
return info.kp_eproc.e_ucred.cr_uid;
}
And of course, you know you can get your own process ID with getpid() and use the Process Manager’s GetProcessPID() function to get a pid if you know another process’ ProcessSerialNumber.
Tags: Code, mac os x, owner, permissions, process, process manager, sample
Posted in Code, Development | 2 Comments »
November 27th, 2007
Well, my number came up today. The hard drive in my MacBook Pro started making this funny crackling, clicking noise. The Finder beachballed. Xcode locked up. I tried to shut down the machine gracefully. Tried to force quit everything that wouldn’t quit. No luck. Power cycled it. It booted to the blue screen, then hung there.
Funny – just two days ago I was visiting my uncle in Colorado, talking with him about statistics and probability, the Gambler’s Fallacy, and the reliability of hard drives. Now TechTool Deluxe tells me my drive has a bunch of bad blocks in the middle of what used to be my data. I guess I asked for this – bad karma.
So I’m going to lose some development time. That really, really sucks. But it doesn’t suck half as much as the prospect of losing all my source code, email, customer databases, test files, scripts, music, and geez – all my photos too. Thankfully, I’m still fairly paranoid about backing up (not as paranoid as I used to be, but still enough that I’ve got a backup in my office from last night, and an off-site backup from last week).
So look at all those files on YOUR Mac. How would you feel if they went away tomorrow? Like really. Y’know – gone, * poof *, never to return. The old adage is that it’s not a question of whether your hard drive will fail, but when. I’m happily calm about my bad day. At least it’s not a Bad Day with a capital ‘B’. Sure, it’s a maddening setback, and I’ve lost a little work – but I haven’t lost everything.
Do yourself a favor. Back up your data. And yes, I mean now. Get SuperDuper!, Time Machine or some other (lesser) backup application and use it. Sometimes it’s a nuisance, but right about now, I know it was a good idea.
Posted in Random Ramblings | 2 Comments »
November 20th, 2007
Happy two-days-before-Thanksgiving! At least for those of you that live in the USA or for some reason share America’s penchant for excessive eating.
Here’s an update on new the look and feel for Default Folder X. Among many things, the buttons have lost their borders for better Leopard karma, fonts and alignment are correct now, and Scott’s been working his magic with the icon. Feature-wise, the previews are smoother, you can now see and change Finder labels in both Open and Save dialogs, and stuff just works like it should. There are also a lot of under-the-hood tweaks for Leopard. I’m happy with the features now and DFX 4 should be ready to roll after a couple more weeks of testing.
Speaking of which, I need a few more dedicated folks to nit-pick and test. If you’d like to get your mitts on a beta copy, drop me an email at betamacs@stclairsoft.com and let me know what kind of machine you’re using, whether you’re running Leopard or Tiger, and why I should listen to your opinions 😉 Sorry folks, but we’ve got enough testers now – thanks to all the folks that volunteered to help! The release will be next week (the week of December 10).
I’ll be heading out to Denver for the holiday, but toting my MacBook Pro as usual, so I’ll never be far from the net. Opinions, rants, and kudos are all welcome (I’m not saying I’ll heed the former, but if you’ve got valid criticisms, I’m never above changing my mind). And yeah, I actually do like turkey, and I really love the getting-together-with-family part of the holidays.
Oh yeah – and to reiterate my response to one of the comments in an earlier entry, if you buy Default Folder X 3.0.6 now, you get 4.0 for free. I’m not going to charge you an upgrade fee if you buy the software 2 weeks (or 2 months) before the new version’s released. That’s just mean.
Tags: Default Folder X, Development, Leopard
Posted in Default Folder X, Development, Leopard | No Comments »
November 5th, 2007
A great article for developers: Exploring Leopard with DTrace. And Matt Gemmell has a fantastic rundown of all the great new Leopard features and API’s in his Get rid of your code with Leopard. I wish there were easier ways to use all of them without inexorably tying your software to 10.5, though. I’ve resorted to loading the QuickLook framework dynamically in DFX 4 so I can use it while still retaining Tiger compatibility, but that’s an easy case because there’s really only one API call I have to manually look up. Weak linking helps (thanks Apple!) but I don’t have a good structure set up for integrating a more complex framework without a lot of painful code. Anyone have any ideas out there? And no, “force your users to upgrade to Leopard” is not a viable answer in my book.
Posted in Development, Leopard | No Comments »
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