![]() They’ve tried to provide people with partial replacements like minifinder, launchpad, spotlight app launching, the sidebar, and so forth. The user interface of Apple’s file dialogs has been a sore point with Apple’s Human Interface Group for decades. You get access to all the standard Finder functionality inside any file dialog (so you can move, rename, etc.If you click on it, the dialog will switch to that folder. If you are in a file dialog (open, save, etc.) and you mouse over a Finder window in the background, it will tell you its name.it still works and you can buy it) Default Folder two truly magnificent features and a bunch of useful but less important stuff. Similarly, if you were going through a folder full of documents it would keep your place for you.īoomerang is long gone but its functionality (and then some) lives on in Default Folder, which became Default Folder X when Apple transitioned to Mac OS X (now macOS).Īside from its major improvement over Super Boomerang (i.e. Then you could jump into Quark XPress and import, find the folder you just saved the picture to and VOILA it was already selected (it was the last thing you saved in that folder) and done. So, for example, if you wanted to load a picture from Photoshop into Quark XPress you could go to Photoshop, export the picture. Remember the last n folders you visited in any given program and in any app and let you get to them instantly.Remember where you were in a folder last time you opened or saved a file there.The most useful of these was called Super Boomerang (itself a refinement of Boomerang). ![]() I won’t go into it, but some of those things are still sorely missed. Waaay back in the 90s there was a collection of UI hacks for the Mac called NOW Utilities which did some amazing things. It’s the next best thing to Apple fixing file dialogs (which they’re never going to do-I literally had an argument with the Human Interface team at WWDC about it back in the 90s). Let me just say this: if you use a Mac as more than a glorified Chromebook, get Default Folder X. And because I’d gotten so used to dealing with file dialogs without it, I just never got to it. So, when I started using my new Macbook Pro in 2021 I forgot to install it. As a result of this, I’ve not been installing it on computers managed by IT departments and, for the last several years that’s been most of my work computers. In today’s buttoned-down world, it needs to ask for permission to do lots of things that seem suspect-it is, after all, keeping track of every file and folder you look at. Now, Default Folder X requires a lot of permissions. Whatever happened to Default Folder, the shareware app I used to install on every Mac as soon as I first logged onto it? Didn’t I have a current license FFS? The left side lets you collect disparate objects.Īs I was tediously navigating folders in an “Open…” dialog today, it struck me that I was doing something stupid and unnecessary. The icons on the right give you access to recent or favorite folders and files and most of Finder’s functionality. I’ve moused over an open Finder window in the background, and Default Folder X is showing the name of folder in that window’s active tab. Tldr if you use a Mac as more than a glorified Chromebook, buy Default Folder X.
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