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Improving
the Open/Save Dialog By Doug Noble The Actionfiles
open dialog adds a menu bar to the dialog box I
love my Mac! But the standard Finder design for Open and Save
has not changed in quite a while, and has not kept up with
my growing number of hard disk volumes, folders and files.
I have over 24,000 files on one partition, and hundreds of
folders. I need fast access to frequently used files. Fortunately, there are several great solutions on the market. Perhaps the most well known is Super Boomerang, which is part of Now Utilities (recently sold to Power On Software). It added various menus to the Open/Save dialog box. But Super Boomerang is not compatible with OS 8. Maybe it will be fixed soon? But wait! There’s a neato $15 shareware utility that offers similar favorite file/folder functionality, called Default Folder. Default Folder keeps track of folders and files you have opened or saved
recently and puts them in a menu in the Open/Save dialog box.
It also has a handy Control Strip plugin that allows you to
get to recent and favorite folders quickly, using keyboard
shortcuts or by pulling down the menu. And unlike Super Boomerang,
Default Folder is very stable, works with OS 8.1, and does
not conflict with most software! http://www.stclairsw.com/ Now there is a new application called Action Files from Power On Software. After seeing a demo at MacWorld in New York, I immediately bought it for $29. Action Files solves one of the biggest failings in the Mac user interface – the Open dialog only lists files in alphabetical order, and you can’t resize the view. Action Files lets you change the order to By Date, By Kind, By Size and more. And you can even do a get Info on a file in the Open/Save dialog, Rename a file, or Move a file to the Trash. The Open/Save dialog box becomes resizable, so you can see as many files as you like, not just 10 or so. Like Default Folder, Action Files keeps track of folders you have visited recently and puts them in a menu. Plus
you can add permanent folders and documents to the list.
One failing - it does not have the keyboard shortcuts that
Default Folder offers. (These features are promised in version
1.1 to be released soon!). But for $29, it’s really
a useful utility that saves a lot of time hunting through
folders, and I have not seen any extension conflicts yet
that I can attribute to it. http://www.actionfiles.com. Both
Action Files and Default Folder are really great utilities.
Default Folder does not have the sorting functionality, but
it is elegant and faster than Action Files, which takes a
little while to display dialogs. Whichever one you choose,
I am sure you will agree you can’t live without them
after using them for a day!
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