Steve's Pad

Path Finder 4.8: making you more productive

September 24, 2007

We’re happy to announce that one of the most requested Path Finder features will at last make its appearance in the upcoming Path Finder 4.8: per-folder settings. The number of requests we received for this feature has been incredible. For an example, take a look at this thread from the Cocoatech forums — it dates back to 2003 and that’s only because the forum has been online since then!

Core Data

CoreData.png

The implementation of per folder settings took over two months of work. To accomplish this we used a Cocoa technology introduced in Tiger called Core Data. Unlike the Finder (with its notorious .DS_Store files) we use no hidden files, we do not require files scattered around in every directory, and no helper files will ever silently appear on your network shares or external hard drives.

Path Finder 4.8 will store its visual per-folder settings in a centralized SQLite database located in ~/Library/Application Support/Path Finder/CoreData. Its size is very small - mine currently weighs just about 150 KB.

Core Data turned out to be really great for our needs, although Steve had to spend some time hacking away at it due to the fact that it only handles basic data types like numbers, strings and data. We had to add our own custom code to handle the unsupported objects like NSColor.

Cool, but what does it all mean for me?

Imagine the following: you can now have your Pictures folder in Icon View, with a special background and the info pane below the icon preview showing you image dimensions and sorted by date created. You can have your Home directory in List View with Documents and Desktop folder triangles always expanded. And you can browse the rest of your hard drive in Column View. Sounds great, isn’t it?

And the best part

This upgrade contains everything — it has an important UI overhaul, a major feature, and a ton of bug fixes and other improvements that would perfectly qualifies it as a major release. But we decided not to go down that road. We’re making it a free upgrade for all existing Path Finder 4 users!

Over the past 18 months Path Finder 4 customers have enjoyed some great updates for free, including:

  • The transition to Intel / Universal Binary
  • Undo support
  • Operations as root
  • Reload button
  • Tabs enhancements
  • Subversion plugin, and now -
  • Per folder settings

We’re at the last stages of internal beta testing phase now, and if everything goes as planned, the update should be ready very soon. Stay tuned!

Posted by grotsasha at September 24, 2007 6:43 AM
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