Apple Peel

Mac OS X Essentials: Default Folder X

As a Mac user, I have always had a number of utilities and other “system enhancements” installed on my machine. While I understand — and fully respect — those Mac users who believe in using a system that is as close to its original, Apple-blessed configuration as possible, I have personally always felt that enhancing my computing environment was worth the potential risks in terms of system stability and reliability.

Fortunately for people like me, the transition from the classic Mac OS to Mac OS X has meant a significant increase in overall system reliability. Thanks to things such as memory protection, it is now much harder for third-party software products to threaten the stability of the system as a whole.

For a while, after the initial release of Mac OS X, this also meant that there was a dearth of third-party system enhancements. The brand new system architecture meant that such utilities often had to be rewritten from the ground up — if their existence was possible at all in the Mac OS X environment. Since such utilities are often developed by small independent developers with limited resources, this also meant that the transition would take a while, because their developers had to learn a brand new developing environment first.

Such was the case with Default Folder. I had been using the software for several years in the classic Mac OS and, even after Apple introduced improved navigation services in Mac OS Open and Save dialog boxes in Mac OS 8, I continued to find the third-party enhancement indispensable. For one thing, individual applications had to be updated to support the new navigation services, and, in the mean time, Default Folder continued to provide its valuable functionality in the old Open/Save dialog boxes. And then, even in the new dialog boxes, the navigation services provided by Apple still fell short of matching the features of Default Folder.

When Mac OS X came out, Mac users such as myself soon found out that, while the Open/Save dialogs had been “improved” by Apple once again, their features were still far from being satisfactory. For some reason, Apple appears unable to find the right balance between simplicity and functionality in that particular area. Many Mac writers have lamented, over the years, the fundamental lack of intuitiveness of Open/Save dialogs in the first place, since such dialogs duplicate existing Finder features without actually providing the full range of commands and the flexibility available in the Finder.

An Alternative for Open/Save Dialogs

Instead of lamenting and waiting for Apple to finally get the message, however, the best thing to do is to explore alternatives. It took a little time for the makers of Default Folder to port their product to Mac OS X, but once it was released, I was immediately impressed. Fortunately for St. Clair Software and for us Default Folder users, Mac OS X does let applications customize the Open/Save dialogs, and Default Folder X takes full advantage of this to provide fantastic enhancements that are available in all programs.

The way Default Folder X works is by adding a row of five buttons to all Open/Save dialog boxes:

Default Folder X's toolbar

and by altering the contents of the “From:”/”Where:” pop-up menu that appears on top of the main area in these dialog boxes, i.e. the column-based view:

"From" menu altered by Default Folder X

As you can see, Default Folder X removes a good part of what Apple includes in the “From:”/”Where:” pop-up menu by default, because it would be redundant with what is provided by the five-button bar. In effect, it changes “From:”/”Where:” pop-up menu back to what it used to be in the old days of the classic Mac OS, i.e. simply a menu enabling you to go up and down the path of folders within folders that leads to your current location. (The latest version of Default Folder X adds the ability to navigate inside these folders through hierarchical submenus, as can be seen in the screen shot above.)

The great thing about this approach is that it works pretty much everywhere, in all Open and Save dialogs in almost all applications (both Cocoa and Carbon) and that, in my experience, it has no impact on either performance or stability. You can even have a little fun on a day when you are really bored: open an Open or Save dialog, watch Default Folder X’s five-button toolbar, and then drag the dialog around very quickly on your screen. You’ll see the five-button toolbar literally “jump” behind you trying to follow the movements of your dialog box. On a fairly fast Power Mac, however, this is barely noticeable as the toolbar snaps back to your dialog box almost instantaneously after you’ve moved it.

More seriously, though, the remarkable usefulness of Default Folder X is best illustrated by a few very simple scenarios. I will use certain applications (Word X, Mail, etc.) in these sample scenarios, but the same benefits apply to other applications such as AppleWorks, Eudora, Safari, etc.

Real-World Scenario #1: Attaching a Word Document in Mail

As part of your work on a project, you create a new document in Word X and save it in a given folder location. Then you go to Mail and want to send that particular Word document as an attachment to an email message. You create your new email message. You go to Mail's “Attach” command, and you are presented with a dialog box to locate and select the desired attachment.

The problem, of course, is that Mail has no idea of what you want to attach to your email. So it shows the default location where it normally looks for attachments, which is almost never the location you need. Mail’s “Attach” command, like all Open/Save dialogs, does have a “Recent Places” section in the “Where:” menu, but unfortunately the places listed there do not include the location you recently used in Word, because the “Recent Places” feature doesn’t work across applications.

That’s where Default Folder X comes to the rescue. Unlike Mac OS X’s “Recent Places” feature, Default Folder X’s “Recent” menu (second button from bottom in the toolbar) does work across applications. If saving your Word document in Word is the last thing you did on your computer, then the folder containing the document will be the first one appearing in the “Recent” list in Default Folder X, no matter which application you are in. (And it will also be accessible using the Option-Down shortcut.)

And even if saving your Word document is not the very last thing you did on your computer, Default Folder X will still have the destination folder included in its “Recent” menu, which can contain up to the 100 most recently used folders. (The number of folders can be adjusted.) The list is sorted chronologically from most recent to least recent, but it can also be set to sort the folders alphabetically, either as the default behavior or temporarily by pressing the Option key down.

The system-wide nature of Default Folder X’s “Recent” menu is the crucial point here. Apple itself has never been able to implement such a universal “Recent” architecture. Even the latest version of Mac OS X still only remembers folders on an application-specific basis or on a Finder-specific basis, which is, as far as I am concerned, far less useful in a document-centric computing environment.

I have written about this before, and I am glad that at least we have a dedicated third-party Mac developer who understands what people in the real world need and shows how it should and can be done.

I also want to stress that Default Folder X’s developer is always working on improving the product. For example, until the latest version, Default Folder X would remember all recently used folders in all applications, except for the folders that were used by opening them in the Finder and then double-clicking on a file contained within them to open the file in its application. This was a flaw in the product, and the developer was aware of it — and now it has been fixed in the latest updated version (free to registered users, of course).

Real-World Scenario #2: Accessing a Folder Open in the Finder

Because human beings don’t all do things in exactly the same way, following the exact same steps, in the exact same order, our computing tools need to be flexible enough to accommodate possible variations.

For example, let’s say that, instead of creating my Word document first, I go to the Finder, open a new window and start browsing my folders of documents, until I find a particular existing location.

This location is now visible in the Finder, but I have not used it (by opening a file that it contains, for example, or by copying a file to it), so it won’t appear in Default Folder X’s “Recent” menu.

Now I switch to Word, create a new document, start typing, and hit Command-S to save it. Of course, Word has no idea that I have been browsing in the Finder and have already identified the location where I want to put this document. So it shows me the default destination for documents, which is almost never the right one.

If I didn’t have Default Folder, I would have to repeat, in the Save dialog sheet in Word, the exact same sequence I followed in the Finder earlier on to locate the folder in question. But here again, Default Folder comes to the rescue. Its “Finder” menu (the one at the bottom, with the Finder icon) is actually a menu containing all the currently open windows in the Finder.

This means that, from within my Save dialog sheet in Word, I can just go to that menu, and select the appropriate window in the menu list. My desired folder will appear in the list, because it is currently one of the windows open in the Finder. Et voilà! Now Default Folder has automatically switched me to the same location as the one that I had opened in the Finder without actually using it for anything.

Alternatively, if the Finder window in question is visible in the background while I am in the Save dialog sheet in Word, I can also use the ability provided by Default Folder to click on that Finder window in the background while in the Save dialog sheet, which will do the same thing (switch me to that particular location in the Save dialog sheet). Since Save dialog sheets in Mac OS X are not modal and are attached to specific documents windows, however, this behavior is optional and can be turned off if you prefer the default Mac OS X behavior, in which clicking on a Finder window in the background while a Save dialog sheet is open in the foreground will simply switch to the Finder, leaving the Save dialog sheet open in the application until you come back to it.

Real-World Scenario #3: Locating a Newly Created Folder in the Finder

Here is another situation. You are in Word. You create a new document, and want to save it, so you press Command-S. You start browsing your document folder hierarchy, and realize that you need to create a new folder before actually saving your new document inside it.

Of course, you don’t need to leave the Save dialog and switch to the Finder to do so. The Save dialog sheet includes a button for creating a new folder in the currently selected folder.

The first problem here is that, unless you are using Mac OS X’s full-keyboard access feature, you cannot access this “New Folder” button without using the mouse. Worse still, once you’ve invoked the “New Folder” dialog and typed in the name for your new folder, pressing the Return key fails to trigger the “Create” button as it normally should (since the “Create” button is in pulsating blue), because of a bug in Mac OS X (which I sincerely hope is fixed in Panther at last!).

Fortunately, once again, Default Folder comes to the rescue. The Default Folder menu (first one in the Default Folder toolbar) includes its own “Create New Folder” command, which can be invoked using the Command-N shortcut in any Save dialog sheet. And in Default Folder’s “New Folder” dialog, the Return key actually works for triggering the “OK” button after having typed the new folder’s name.

Once this is done, you can now save your new Word document inside the new folder. All that time you have not left the Save dialog sheet in Word.

But now you go to the Finder and want to create a backup copy of the document you’ve just been working on in Word. Of course, since you created the new folder containing the document from within a Save dialog sheet in Word, the folder in question does not yet appear in a Finder window in the Finder. So you create a new Finder window, and you have to start all over again, browsing down your document folder hierarchy to try and locate this new folder that you’ve just created…

Well, not if you own Default Folder! If you have Default Folder, you can use the Default Folder Dock menu icon in the Dock, which gives you access to similar functionality to what’s available through the Default Folder toolbar in Open/Save dialogs:

Default Folder X's Dock menu

Among other things, you can go to the “Recent Folders” menu, where you will find, of course, the new folder you’ve just created from within Word a while ago. Select it, and it will open in a new Finder window — and there is the file of which you wanted to make a backup copy.

This might seem pretty trivial to you, but it’s all very fundamental stuff that Mac OS X is simply unable to do for you. If you use Mac OS X’s built-in commands for this, you can go to the “Go” menu in the Finder and select the “Recent Folders” in that menu, but you will not find the folder that you recently created from within Word in the list. Sad, but true.

Of course, there is another way to access this new folder containing your document, which doesn’t require Default Folder. While still in Word, you can go to the document’s title bar, hold the Command key down and click on the window’s name. This will display a pop-up menu with the path leading to the document file, including the folder containing it. Selecting the folder name in that pop-up menu will cause that folder to open in a new window in the Finder.

But using a computer — and Mac OS X in particular — is all about providing multiple alternatives and ensuring consistency. Default Folder provides the alternative for accessing newly-created folders that Mac OS X itself fails to provide, and the Mac OS X interface is not consistent in that it has a “Recent Folders” feature that does not include all the recent folders you have worked on or created.

Real-World Scenario #4: Working around the Columns View in Open/Save dialogs

Another reason to use Default Folder X with Jaguar is that it helps you work around some of the annoying limitations of Jaguar’s Open/Save dialogs. As you know, such dialogs are only available in one view mode, which is a columns-based view mode similar to the “View as Columns“ mode in the Finder.

One of the problems with that view mode is that you cannot resize columns in Open/Save dialogs. You can only resize the entire Open/Save dialog, and watch the columns stretch or shrink in rather unpredictable fashion. You have little control over things as a user, and personally in most cases I am unable to obtain the column width I want, no matter how big I make the Open/Save dialog. This is frustrating, because I often have file names that are too long to be displayed in full in the column, and Mac OS X displays a truncated version of the file name instead, often hiding crucial bits of information.

I know I can hold the Option key down while hovering over a file name in the column in order to get Mac OS X to display the full name of the file in a “tool tip”-like pop-up window — but this only works half of the time for me, and even when it works, it never works as quickly as I need it to.

I realize that the new Open/Save dialogs in Panther will improve things by providing two view modes (View as List and View as Columns) instead of one. I am glad that Apple is starting to realize that the Open/Save dialogs need to match the functionality available in Finder windows as closely as possible. (In that respect, I don’t see why Open/Save dialogs cannot also have a View as Icons view mode.)

But until Panther is widely available and widely used, people will still need to work around the limitations of the Open/Save dialog in Jaguar (and previous versions of Mac OS X).

Here again, Default Folder comes to the rescue, by giving you a simple command that lets you open the currently selected folder in the Open/Save dialog in a new window in the Finder. This way, if you are in a folder in Columns view in an Open/Save dialog and you cannot see the full names of the files the folder contains in order to select the appropriate one, you can invoke the Default Folder command to open the corresponding window in the Finder and change the viewing options there that you cannot change in the Open/Save dialog. You can then return to the Open/Save dialog and use the appropriate file.

Conclusion

There is much, much more to Default Folder X than what I have described in this column. There are many more possible scenarios. There are simply too many features and finely-tuned functions to describe in full in a column that is already close to 3,000 words.

I simply hope that I have given you a fairly good idea of why Default Folder X is such an essential tool for any Mac OS X user and will remain so for many years to come. It is quite clear to me that Apple has to work on too many things at the same time to really be able to achieve the optimal level of convenience and user-friendliness in each and every aspect of its many software offerings. Apple might get there eventually — but don’t expect Panther to be the ultimate solution and provide all the necessary alternatives and finely-tuned functions that you really need. If you don’t feel like waiting for many more years (or until Apple runs out of feline species), do yourself a favor and get Default Folder X now.

- Pierre Igot

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