Cocoatech: Revision History

Path Finder 3.2.2 Changelog

Path Finder 3.2.2 is an emergency release which rectifies a conflict with Stuffit 9.

Previous versions of Path Finder 3.x will crash on launch if Stuffit 9 Expander, Deluxe, or Standard are installed. There are no other changes to this version.

Path Finder 3.2.1 ChangeLog

You couldn't change the default application for items without Path Finder crashing - this is now fixed.
Fixed an issue with Word documents whose default application is Path Finder. If the preference to use Path Finder to open Word documents was not checked, double-clicking one of these files would cause Path Finder to hang.
Fixed application binding issue, where "Change All" would have no effect.
Cleaned up the sorting of the Users and Groups menus in the Get Info window
Tweaked a small Shelf display problem, where the Shelf would sometimes spontaneously disappear on launch.
Fixed a small problem with file names not being sorted correctly
Fixed a screen refresh issue with the PDF viewer, and hooked up the following quick keys:
- Arrow - Up and Arrow - Down : Self-explanatory
- Space bar : scrolls down one page
- Shift-Space bar : scrolls up one page
Integrated new OmniFrameworks
Fixed the Cocoatech FTP connection in the help menu
New version checking code using MacPad
Menus are now generated dynamically using Cocoa - this might help speed things up a bit
Screen capture doesn't come up as sheet anymore
Fixed the bug with breaking long file names words with ...
Other small optimizations and tweaks

Path Finder 3.2 Changelog

Integrating burning capability: Select some files and burn them, or open a burning window and drag files into it to burn. A great way to make a quick backup of important files, or to move files to another computer. You can now also burn disk images.
Brand new Connect to Server: The Connect to Server window has been completely overhauled and updated. We were originally using OS X’s built-in connection window, which was very buggy and crashed a lot. Well, it’s buggy no more!
Completely expanded search feature: This completely rewritten feature utilizes the new fast search capabilities of Mac OS 10.3.
New Disk image features: You can now create disk images from folders and packages, with a bunch of new formats and options.
New Compression options: bzip2 has been added to Path Finder, and is now the default compression format. If you prefer, you can switch back to the previous gzip format in the preferences.
Snap to Grid: This option is now available for the desktop icons. You can now have icons automatically snap to an underlying grid when you have auto-arrange turned off.
Built-in Screencapture: Allows you to take screenshots of objects and selections, plus you can send the capture through Path Finder’s built-in image editor for format conversion, resizing, cropping, etc.
New reports added: You can now create a report of the current Pasteboard contents, as well as Unix man pages as a printable PDF file.
Exposé improvements: The Path Finder desktop and trash can now stay put when Exposé is triggered.
List view header contextual menu: You can now show and hit columns in the list view by control+clicking when the pointer is over the list headers. The list feature has also been completely rewritten and improved.
Sample. Control+click on a process in the process drawer and sample it.
Improved Secure Delete function with more options, and added a Secure Empty trash.
Launch new instance: In the process shelf control+click on a running application to launch a new instance of the application. This allows you to have multiple copies of the same application running simultaneously.
Preview drawer for mp3s, movies, etc. now has a Play button. This improves the performance when just selecting files, and doesn’t keep the file open if the user tried to eject a CD-ROM or something.
Added a “Calculate” button for file size to speed up the info window and drawer.
New file rename refinement: When you select a file to rename it, Path Finder now highlights just the name of the item, leaving the extension alone.
Drop Stack improvements: There now is a “Add to Drop Stack” contextual menu item. The Drop Stack now understands aliases, so if you put an item into the drop stack and then move the original, the Drop Stack will still be able to find it. Items now also stay in the drop stack until successfully dragged out, or the window is closed. Option-drag an item into the Drop stack and a “+” sign will appear in the Drop stack. When you drag this item out, it will be copied instead of moved.
iDisk Menu: A new iDisk menu has been added to the Go menu.
MP3 Preview Window improvements: You can now view album cover art and ID3 tag information for MP3 files in the preview information window. ID3 version 2.3 and lower is supported. Sorry, no AAC support yet!
Interface refinements: There are new snazzy gradients for selected item and Path Navigator. The labels appearance has been tweakified. The appearance of selected files has also been prettied up.

Bugfixes, refinements, and other improvements

New, better optimized file copy code. This needs lots of testing: copy large files back and forth and let us know how things work.
Fixed a drag and drop crash that started happening some time after OS 10.3.2 was released.
If you have Interface sounds turned on (in OS X's Sound Preference Pane), Path Finder will now give audio feedback when an item is added to the trash.
Removed the plugins menu from the commands menu (will reappear if and when plugins are added - people interested in creating Path Finder plugins should check out the Open Source page for more details.).
Fixed problem with drag-selecting-scrolling in list and icon view (slowness and other funny business).
Improved the desktop icon placement code - things shouldn’t jump around as much (hopefully) and new aliases and such should appear in a more sensible place.
Fixed problem with deleting menu key settings.
Did lots of code optimization and reorganization - this should hopefully speed things up (startup, overall speed).
You can now sort column views by a multitude of different options. Control+click on the column name (at the top of the column) to bring up the sort option menu.
Fixed a network trash error, where Path Finder wouldn’t delete networked files immediately, and instead copied them to a .Trashes folder on the remote server.
Fixed the phantom Applications folder that kept appearing in the user’s home folder.
Fixed annoying horizontal scrollbar that kept appearing in list and icon view
First run at wrapping long file names by word rather than by character count in icon view (often reported, finally fixed [we hope])
Added some new Word document preferences - open in Path Finder, and a toggle for previewing Word documents in Preview drawer / window.
(note: The Microsoft Word preview tool is built into the operating system and is rather buggy. Certain word documents can crash Path Finder, so keep this in mind when turning on inline Word document previews.)
Path Finder now accepts GURL apple events. This means that you can set Path Finder as the helper application for the FTP protocol and Path Finder will mount the ftp server.
Small fixes to label sorting and menu keys - you couldn’t apply a quick key to the grey label before; this is now fixed.
Fixed the file rename problem that started appearing after OS 10.3.2 was released.
Added “Hides on Deactivate” window menu item, which hides windows that have this option toggled when they are put into the background / lose focus.
New preferences added: Open Archives with Path Finder, Draw label color on icon, and draw label color on name.
Column contents now appear in the leftmost column when you click on shelf and volume drawer items. Consistency at last!
Fixed the terminal session preference text problem (you could activate editing in the preference window, but couldn’t change the text there).
Made the new file permission preferences stick for new items.
Enabled the bug / crash reporter for beta builds.
Fixed the name disappearing bug when connected to network volumes
Network volume items added to the shelf now keep their names when disconnected.
New, updated localizations for French, Finnish, German, and Italian.
The help window comes up the first time Path Finder is launched (showing the “Getting Started” page) and every time the version changes (showing the “What’s New” page). Information is power. The help window also has some interface refinements.
Added .mid files to the list of previewable items (midi files)
Reworked the Dock menu (adding new browser, new terminal, new text file items).
Now you can search on Owner, Group, and Permissions (see new popups in find window).
New trash menu in process / volumes drawer
Improved the floating windows (shelf, processes, preview). They’re now more compact and now have a transparency button on the bottom left of the window.
‘odoc’ events with text files now don’t open in PF unless preference is set (pref is set by default, so it must be turned off if you don’t want text files opening in PF). This should fix the BBEdit manual problems some users were reporting, where the manual would open in Path Finder’s PDF viewer even when Path Finder wasn’t set as the default application for PDFs.
Stop button in file transfers fixed - it was greyed out in earlier builds.
Searchable help: Type a word into the search box, and then hit command + g to cycle through the help documents.
Get info window comes up faster
Fixed the control+click problem in list and column view (no contextual menu appearing) in the file browser

Plus many more smaller, smallest, and smallest-est changes and refinements.

Path Finder 3.1 Changelog

New Panther Finder-like zooming when opening files and applications
Eject buttons for firewire disks in process drawer
New Quit buttons in process drawer
Firewire disks eject properly
Hiding toolbar will now hide the shelf and drawers
Built-in StuffIt commands (requires Stuffit Deluxe 8.0.2)
"Mount disk images after expand" preference
Contextual menu editor
Small font for contextual menus
Transparent desktop mode (allows you to see the default OS X desktop picture) - you need to quit the Finder or empty your desktop folder if you don't want to see the Finder's desktop icons.
Completely re-wrote and improved the spring loaded folders feature
Spring loaded time slider
Text Editor opens and saves Microsoft Word files
Disk usage indicator in top right (shows how much disk space has been used in current volume)
Red colored cropping indicator in image converter
New style toolbar buttons (see them change in metal and aqua)
Better alternating row drawing
You can now set a background picture in column view
Set the grid color on the shelf
Vastly improved text drawing, which speeded everyhing up nicely.
Improved memory efficiency
Lots of Panther specific bug fixes!
Added a new help viewer
Expanded and improved the help files

Path Finder 3.0.1 Changelog

New Help files!
Fixed desktop picture drawing
Added rotate buttons in image converter
Fixed a bunch of issues with 10.3
New process window (see windows menu)
Fixed a permission problem where it wasn't checking the group ID
New preference to turn off the application menu
You can now doubleclick the PDF preview in the drawer to open it in the PDF viewer
Clicking on a process in the process drawer, or selecting the process from the application menu will bring all the windows forward (like the dock)
Improved the Open with submenu in the commands menu
Improved the Open with panel
Added current directory to the Find file sheet
Clicking in the menu bar has been significantly sped up!
Added three new reports: Defaults (dump all of the current user's preferences), Class dump and Symbol table: click on a Cocoa application or framework and see all the undocumented symbols and methods!
Fixed a bug with "mount volumes in new window" pref
Window now resizes or moves if any of the drawers are opened and it needs space
Added Alias bit in Get info panel
Added Path Finder Aliases: create aliases to folders that open in Path Finder and not Apple's Finder.
No longer resolving aliases in the preview info in the drawer or Get Info. This lets you see the alias info, not the resolved files info.
"Email" and "Compress and Email" commands.
Lauch Application... and Open With... commands. opens a panel letting the user pick an app to launch or open a document.
Added a file list to Secure Delete panel so you know what's going to be deleted.
HTML button in toolbar to make a new html document
Added a Convert Image toolbar item
Changed the code to get the current list of volumes to some new code. Some users were reporting problems where the volume name.
Path Finder now updates the Dock's Trash icon when it empties the trash.
Replace panel now says "do you want to replace the NEWER/OLDER item..."
Fixed a bug with the version string
Added a 15 pixel offset to the terminal drawer. It looked a bit strange before.
Added a new Extension column and a bunch of Sort By choices.
Cmd-Down arrow no longer opens folder in new window.
Activate inactive file browser window during drag and drop.
Added Preference to Show Grid in the Shelf.
Improved Open With contextual menu item. It's much better now.

Path Finder 3

Path Finder 3 is a major update, with dozens of improvements, bug fixes, and other optimizations and changes. Frankly, there are so many changes to this version, it's hard to keep track. Here's a nowhere-near complete list:

Added a PDF Viewer
Added a Terminal window, drawer, and pertinent preferences
Added the ability to open a terminal window at the current location
Drop Stack: pause drag-and-drop operations
Shelf: access frequently accessed items from anywhere in Path Finder
Added shelf item contextual menu
Moveable Desktop icons
Process / volumes drawer
Added Action Menu to toolbar
Added Documents and Favorites menus to toolbar
Added Processes as a new report you can generate
Added the ability to option-click to open item in new window
Added a contextual menu item for the Path Navigator
Added the ability to command+click or option+click on items to open them in a new windows
Overall speed improvements
Added the ability to automatically set permissions for new files
Added the ability to create new HTML pages from the file menu
Added a bunch of crazy themes
Added icon previews and the ability to create them for files that do not have one
Added buttons to open and close preview and process drawers
Gave the gift of speed to the preferences window
Added a preference to loop around when arrowing through file listings
Added a "Reveal in Path Finder" global hot key
Added a default extension for text files preference
Lots of interface tweaks, changes, and improvements
Bug fixes! Bug fixes! Bug fixes!

Path Finder 2.1.1

The Path Finder 2.1.1 release addresses performance, fixes bugs, and adds some new functionality.

A list of what's new:

Speed improvements
View Text option added along with View Hex when a file can't find an application
Use relative dates preference added for date display in list view
Dynamically change date format as column grows and shrinks
Added custom icon to alias files if one exists
Fixed crashing bug in BrowserItem hasChildren (browserModel wasn't being retained)
Added 10 and 13 point icon sizes (now you can make things really small)
Fixed problem where double-click on desktop was bringing up Open panel incorrectly
Open sourced the Path Finder plugin SDK
Hex view, get info, and graphic converter are now plugins.
Improved graphics converter - added the crop and convert to black and white functionality
PDF view in preview drawer improved
Added a search textfield in the text editor toolbar
included the new version of omni frameworks
Image preview now has a background pattern to help display transparency
Ejecting disk problem fixed (async calls in OS X are buggy)
Added icons for text, html, and rtfd files so the icons will show when PF is set to open those files
Support for Labels X colors and name changes added
Added .ape unsanity files to the preview window
Preview of icon shows label color
Added Copy Path feature to the contextual menu
Fixed speed issue with Applications pref panel
Path Finder now creates .webloc files when a url is dragged from a web browser
Added locate command to find window
Fixed find window to come up when no file browser window is open
Fixed some issues with Candy Bar
added support for DragThing

Path Finder 2.1

File reports feature. Detailed report of every file attribute.
Integrated Aladdin's StuffIt engine. Decompression is handled by
New preferences panel with many more preferences.
Integrated word processor.
Improved toolbar. You can now directly drag and drop folders into
Recent Folders and Recent Files menus added to Go menu
Final Cut Pro files now work in the preview window
Preview window can now play classic sound resource files.
Improved AppleScript support
Improved network performance
Added a Quit Finder command.
New columns for List View: Access, Owner, Group
Integrated the Omni Frameworks from www.omnigroup.com
Fixed version checker
now you will be notified automatically when
Warning if user tries to open more than a few files at once
Arrow keys no longer loop around when reaching the end of the list
Right arrow no longer launches file or applications in Column view.
Show in new window no longer opens packages
Fixed insert nil exception in saveViewState
fixed problem with creating alias with : in filename
change all code to use FSRefs instead of calling unix calls. (should
Sort By Date Modified was backwards
icon view wasn't update number of items on a paste
Fixed a few bugs when moving items to the trash can
File find is now faster
Now sorting dot files at end
Now warning for emptying individual trash cans
Double clicking on disk on desktop does was not making the window key
Empty trash progress window was staying up until the next event
Now growing inline renamer on a paste
Right click on blank area of column did not target that column if not
Added hide trash can in trashes contextual menu
Fixed some ownership/permission problems with the Touch command
expand a folder in list view. trash the item, the next item in the
network volumes should copy with smaller buffer
dim out sym link menu item for volumes that don't support it
fixed exception when moving files to trash (passed nil instead of @"")
Fixed Custom icon for volumes
Show in Finder now restarts the finder if not running
Added "New Folder" button for copy or move command.
Smart ordering of Favorites menu
Added Favorites menu to global applications menu
improved Go to Folder dialog
Fixed crash with find sheet
Fixed Next Window command
Fixed small icons in toolbar overflow menu
Ejecting disks refresh problem fixed
Fixed sort order problem with smart sort
Fixed scrolling behavior when expanding disclosure triangle in list
Took out "Reveal in Path Finder" in Path Finder's contextual menu
Added don't open a blank window by default preference
added the Finder as a preference for Get Info application
Escape key now ends a file rename
When clicking on the Path Finder icon in the Dock, Path Finder now
Double click on images in preview window to launch the file
Fixed bug with renaming in the getinfo panel
Fixed bug with changing owner of file in Get Info panel
File selection is faster
Improved speed when using Path Navigator
Added Save All menu for text editor
Fixed bug with key matching in file lists
Added page numbers in text editor
Added secure delete to contextual menu
Added convert image to contextual menu
Added "Empty Trash" the dock menu
Changed icons in trash menu to volumes
Added view and empty trash menu to trashes contextual menu
Added encoding preference for preview window
Added font preference for preview window
Fixed Open in New Window feature
Faster launch time
Copy Paste and drag and drop of images from the preview window.
Preference for turning off the splash screen at launch
Font report.