Posts Tagged
finder
Over the past week or so we’ve been on a mission to help you improve the experience of file browsing by introducing you to interesting Finder alternatives. We started with TotalFinder, which boosts your Finder’s natural functionality by adding tabs. We then moved on to Raskin, which dramatically redesigns the entire file browsing process.
Today we’ll wrap up this series with an incredibly useful and unique utility called Default Folder X, which helps you navigate your file structure at lightning speed when saving or opening files.
Earlier this week we took a look at TotalFinder, a reserved but incredibly useful Finder replacement that uses a tabbed interface to augment your typical file browsing experience.
Today we’re going to follow that up with something that’s not a subtle change but a completely re-imagined file browser like nothing else you’ve ever used: Raskin. Intrigued? You should be.
It’s coming up on two years since we first took a look at an interesting Finder replacement app called TotalFinder, which was in its initial stages of development at the time. It was a little shaky back then but it has come a long way and is definitely worth another look.
In case you’ve never used it, we’ll walk through what TotalFinder is and why it just might make you leave the normal finder behind for good.
The Finder and I go way back: from my family’s ’96 Performa to my MacBook Pro, I’ve used it to navigate my Mac for well over a decade. Since the initial transition from OS 9 to OS 10, I would argue that the way we use the Finder has changed very little, and a lot of what has changed is purely aesthetic. Though I now have the option to browse through my files with Cover Flow or create smart folders, I still use the Finder in pretty much the same way as I did 10 years ago.
With the recent announcement of OS 10.7, I was very disappointed to learn that the Finder won’t be seeing any improvements, but that doesn’t mean 3rd party developers aren’t hard at work to continue where Apple has left off. Cocoatech’s Path Finder has been around for quite some time and ambitiously tries to replace the Finder altogether to create a more modern, usable means of navigating your computer. Find out if Path Finder successfully replaces the ubiquitous Finder after the jump!
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If you’re anything like me, your downloads folder is a huge mess of disorganized PDFs, Word documents, Keynote presentations and text files with uninformative names like form.doc and scan0111.pdf.
To clean up this mess, Ironic Software developed Yep, promising iPhoto/iTunes-like management for your documents
I’m a die-hard Alfred fan, and when I’m being good and giving my documents appropriate names, it’s a huge help. However, when I’m downloading and reading dozens of documents on a short deadline, all my good habits go out the window with my to-do list.
Yep claims to be the document organizer for the lazy and forgetful among us, find out if it delivers after the jump!
Window management in OS X has come a long way in recent years. Exposé gave us the ability to quickly view or hide our windows, Spaces gave us multiple environments to store and organize our windows, and most recently Dock Exposé has given us even more flexibility.
However, aside from a little AppleScripting, there is still no easy way to manage window sizes with the default OS X tools. Fortunately, a couple of third party options have popped up recently that handle this task with ease. Below we’ll take at look at both SizeUp and Divvy to see who reigns supreme as the window management king.
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Imagine your files and folders sitting in a Finder window. It’s simple, and there’s no clutter. The only information you have about them is the name underneath. Of course we both know that there’s more to learn about each file. Much more!
Picture that all the “metadata” for a file or folder is engraved on it – unique – just like our finger prints. You’d need a magnifying glass to see it all. Let me introduce you to your magnifying glass: the “Get Info” Pane.
In this article I’ll introduce you to it, take you through a tour, and give some helpful hints along the way.
The Apple experience is pretty slick, but one thing that frustrates many users is the Finder. Although it gets the job done, it hasn’t evolved a great deal in recent years and is missing a few widely-requested features.
As an integral part of OS X, the aptly named ‘Finder’ is used to find, move and delete files, install applications and even preview files – but all of this activity leaves us with a lot of windows open. Sure, you can keep pressing ‘cmd + w’ until they’ve all gone, or you can download TotalFinder.
The quest for the perfect information store is unending. Many of us long for a single place where we can put everything so that it’s easy to find and work with. Of course you could use various folders in a complex directory structure – I did that for years, nesting folders for months within folders for years within folders for particular areas of interest.
Needless to say, this soon became unworkable! So then I broke down my intricate folders and dumped everything into a single big ‘Archive’ folder, trying to rely on Spotlight to find what I needed. That worked better, but I sometimes found it difficult to track down what I was after.
My system’s gone through a few more transformations since then, and I have tried several different apps along the way. Together is one of the best I’ve used, and it has some features that might make it the ideal solution for many people.
Desktops can be boring. Not the desktop that your computer rests on, but the desktop that resides inside your computer. Some of you are probably a little OCD about keeping the desktop spotless, while others just chuck everything on it until the screen is filled with files and folders. Regardless, they’re boring. But should they be?
Bump Technologies certainly don’t think so with BumpTop, which was just released for Mac OS X a matter of days ago. BumpTop completely transforms your Desktop into a 3D ‘room’ where you can spread files around, stack them, and stick them to the walls as if they were on a real desk.
