Path Finder 4 (at last)

16 January 2006 · 1 comment

Every Mac comes with the Finder where you can move and delete files, find stuff, rename things and all that. Sometime though I stumbled across Cocoatech’s Path Finder 3.2, gave it a whirl and decided to buy and use it. Now finally, after a very long wait, version 4 has finally appeared. Path Finder is [...]

Every Mac comes with the Finder where you can move and delete files, find stuff, rename things and all that. Sometime though I stumbled across Cocoatech’s Path Finder 3.2, gave it a whirl and decided to buy and use it. Now finally, after a very long wait, version 4 has finally appeared.

Path Finder is an innovative file browser and manager with powerful tools to make you more productive on Mac OS X.

This morning I’ve discovered two interesting things:

  1. A javascript embedded in a saved HTML file acts on the PathFinder browser window when I click on that file in PathFinder. It’s a script to resize and move the browser.
  2. The default HTML file you can create with Pathfinder is a coding mess.

I like my web browser positioned just so on my screen so when I created a small page with my 2006 affirmation to have as my browser startup I included the Javascript snippet. Here’s my bit of Javascript to resize and move the browser.

<script language="JavaScript"> self.moveTo(0,0);self.resizeTo(1020,745); </script>

PathFinder does all sorts of very useful things — check the website for full details — but it’s very handy to be able to create a new text file or a new HTML document from the File menu. The HTML file was a mess though, with an XHTML transitional Doctype, unclosed p tags wrapping headings, unclosed br tags and so on. I didn’t actually study it; just recoiled in surprise.

After a bit of searching round I found the template and was able to replace it with one of my own. You need to look in /Applications/Path Finder.app/Contents/Resources/htmlTemplate.html. It’d be nice to have a more direct access to that template, but at least this works.

Now, some of my favourite features of PathFinder:

  • The Drop Stack for piling up files I want to move and holding them till I get to the folder(s) I ant to move them to.
  • Compress and decompress files with a click on the Toolbar button.
  • Quitting applications from the Processes shelf.
  • The Preview shelf.
  • The Path Navigator for bopping around between parent and child folders.

There are more; there are always more, but those are a few of the features I use all the time.

1 comment

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Neil 17 January 2006 at 01:47 57

So the preview area resized when it read that javascript? That’s bizarre – we never received reports on that from the beta team, but I guess it’s possible that no one had a file on their system that had an onload function. I’ll see what’s up.

And yes, (red-faced) I’m totally embarrassed by the default HTML file, especially because I’m kind of a web standards guy. I just keep forgetting to give Steve a new, better coded one. Thanks for the reminder!

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