Version 6.3.2 of Default Folder X is out! It adds a switch to turn off the new drag target that pops up below the menu bar when you drag files in the Finder.
Some people find it distracting, so you can now turn it off here:
The “I can’t use the menu” bug
This release also completely fixes a bug that I had apparently minimized but not eliminated in version 6.3.1. When clicking on a popup menu in Save As dialogs (usually one for choosing the file format to save in apps like Illustrator, Word and Preview) the menu would sometimes pop up and immediately go away. I wasn’t able to reproduce the problem here, so did the best I could to solve it in version 6.3.1. My “fix” resolved the issue for most people, but some Macs were still afflicted.
TL;DR
The bug is now truly fixed.
The long explanation
Fast forward to this week, and a very diligent and determined user experiencing the bug managed to narrow down the circumstances that caused it on his machine (thank you Sławek!!). And the culprit was… drum roll 🥁 … Apple’s Weather app.
Really?? Sure enough, I added the Weather icon to my menu bar, and I could finally reproduce the problem here.
Due to an interesting design choice by an Apple engineer or some sort of bug in macOS, the little app that shows the Weather icon in the menu bar actually posts redundant menu tracking notifications to the system whenever you click on a menu (yes, any menu, not just the Weather menu). As it happens, Default Folder X watches for those notifications and uses them to manage the contents of Save dialogs. In this case, it was basically being told that a menu had gone away as soon as you clicked on a popup menu button. And confusingly, Default Folder X’s response to that notification actually made the menu go away! So you’d just get a brief flicker of a menu when you clicked on “File format” in Word, Illustrator, Preview or any other app that used a popup menu.
With this now clear, I just changed Default Folder X to ignore those extra notifications being posted by Weather, and a really bizarre problem is finally solved. And to any other developers out there, watch out if you use the distributed notifications com.apple.HIToolbox.beginMenuTrackingNotification and com.apple.HIToolbox.endMenuTrackingNotification – you’ll be getting some extra menu tracking notifications if Weather is in the menu bar. Look at notification.userInfo to determine whether the notification is real or not.
Back to the Default Folder X update
Oh right, I was telling you about the new version of Default Folder X. It also works around an issue caused by a bug in Adobe’s support for the macOS Accessibility API. That resulted in Quick Look previews in file dialogs being obscured by Default Folder X’s toolbar and other controls.
As usual, this update is free for everyone who’s already bought a license for Default Folder X 6. You can get it by selecting Check for Update from Default Folder X’s menu in your menu bar, or by going to the What’s New page.
Version 6.3.1 of Default Folder X is ready! This release provides bug fixes on macOS 27 Golden Gate and 10.13 High Sierra (the newest and oldest supported systems). It also makes one of its drag-and-drop features more visible and easier to work with.
Whenever you begin dragging a file or folder, Default Folder X will show a little icon of a folder below the menu bar. Drag and drop the item onto this icon and you’ll get Default Folder X’s menu, letting you quickly choose a folder to receive the item you dragged.
It lets you drag and drop files without having to open a window in the Finder first.
A bug in macOS 27 Save dialogs which could make it impossible to select a file format from a popup menu has been fixed. Single-clicking on a folder in List View in file dialogs no longer opens the folder, and syncing settings over iCloud correctly updates pinned folders. Default Folder X’s Finder toolbar icons are also the correct size on Golden Gate, and a bug that broke navigation to folders on High Sierra has been fixed.
This update is free to users who have purchased a license for Default Folder X 6. You can see a full change history and download the update on the What’s New page, or by choosing “Check for Update” from Default Folder X’s menu in your menu bar.
Default Folder X 6.3 is available and ready for Apple’s impending release of macOS 27! This new version adds support for the Open and Save dialogs in macOS 27, as well as conforming to the many small (and welcome) changes to the macOS user interface after the debacle that was macOS 26.
This release also brings a number of new features and refinements to Default Folder X, along with some important bug fixes.
Pinning recent folders and files
You can now “pin” recent files and folders in their menus, making them stay there until you unpin them. It’s a quick, lightweight way to keep something as a “favorite” when you know you’ll only need it for a short time.
Just press the Shift key while an item is highlighted in the Recent Files, Recent Folders or Recent Apps menu. A little pin will appear next to the item (that’s what the red arrow in the image below is pointing to). The next time you use the menu, that item will be pinned to the top, and will stay there until you highlight it and hit the Shift key again.
“Where From” metadata and sorted tags
When you download something in Safari, Chrome or Firefox, macOS sets a “where from” attribute on the file, indicating the URL from which you downloaded it. Default Folder X now shows that information in its Info tab below Open dialogs:
In addition, in the Tags pane you can sort recent tags by name or date so you can find them more easily, then drag them into the tagging field.
There are also usability enhancements to Finder-click, drag-and-drop handling, Default Folder X’s AppleScript interface and more.
Bug fixes
A number of important issues have been addressed in Default Folder X 6.3, including:
Hangs when adding folders in Settings > Folders
Problems clicking on grayed-out filenames in Save dialogs when in column view
Issues updating Default Folder X’s settings at logout and when syncing via iCloud
Significant slow-downs when running the LanguageTool app
These are just some of the new features and fixes in Default Folder X 6.3. For a full list of changes and download links, head over to the What’s New page. Or if you’re already running a previous version of Default Folder X, just select “Check for Update” from its menu in your menu bar.
As usual, this update is free if you’ve already purchased a license for version 6 of Default Folder X. If you haven’t bought your copy yet, now’s the time! Stop wasting precious minutes getting to your files and folders – Default Folder X puts them just a mouse click or keystroke away!
A new beta version of App Tamer 3 is available. It offers the option to display CPU temperature in the menu bar and beefs up its Process Details window to be much more useful.
You can now see the CPU and memory usage of all of an app’s helpers and subprocesses. An application’s overall usage in App Tamer’s process list is the sum of the usage of the app and all of its subprocesses, but sometimes it’s useful to see which subprocess is responsible for the bulk of it.
Command-click on a process or right-click and choose “Process Details” from the contextual menu to get the window shown above. It lists all of the helpers and subprocesses with a live display of their memory and CPU usage.
Another very important update in this beta is a fix for a bug which could cause frustrating problems in other apps (most notably Xcode). In App Tamer’s checks to see if a browser was in the process of downloading a file, it neglected to close a file descriptor after the download check. This would gradually run the system out of file descriptors, eventually resulting in some apps’ inability to communicate with sub-tasks. My apologies for the problem!
There are also several minor fixes – a full change history is available on the App Tamer Testing page, along with download links for the latest beta build.
Apple’s latest macOS 27 Golden Gate betas contain an assertion that crashes apps intermittently. I’ve been patiently waiting for Apple to release a fix, but in the meantime there have been over 500 crashes logged in Default Folder X as a result of this bug.
The latest beta test release of Default Folder X, version 3.6b5, works around the problem by patching Apple’s offending NSRemoteView class (thanks to JyHu in the Apple Developer Forums for coming up with this solution). Those of you running a Golden Gate beta, please update to Default Folder X 3.6b5 so the crashes stop.
This release also fixes some graphical problems when running on High Sierra (yes, DFX still supports macOS 10.13) and eliminates the “automatically download and install updates” feature in Default Folder X’s settings. I did the latter because most people never quit Default Folder X and rarely restart their Macs – waiting for that to happen before installing an update no longer makes sense. And if Default Folder X doesn’t wait, that means that it needs to pop up an alert saying that it has to restart to install the update. At that point you might as well just use the regular update mechanism which pops up an alert saying there’s an update available (and as an added benefit, shows the release notes so you know what changed). So I simply removed the “automatically download and install” option altogether.
Release notes and download links for Default Folder X 3.6b5 are on the Default Folder X Testing page.
Version 6.3 of Default Folder X is in public beta testing, delivering support for Apple’s beta release of macOS 27 Golden Gate. If you’re running a Golden Gate beta, you need to use this version of Default Folder X because version 6.2.8 doesn’t support macOS 27.
If you run into any issues, please report them immediately. In particular, if Default Folder X crashes on macOS 27 developer beta 3, please send an email to DefaultFolderX@stclairsoft.com. I’ve gotten 3 crash logs, but don’t know the circumstances around the error – I’d love to be able to reproduce it and fix it with your help!
Pinning recent folders and files
Now onto more fun topics: Default Folder X 6.3 includes a new feature! Well, it’s actually similar to a really, really old feature that appeared in ACTION Files in the late 1990’s. You can now “pin” recent files and folders in their menus, making them stay there until you unpin them. It’s a really quick, lightweight way to keep something as a “favorite” when you know you’ll only need it for a short time.
Just press the Shift key while an item is highlighted in the Recent Files, Recent Folders or Recent Apps menu. A little pin will appear next to the item (that’s what the red arrow in the image below is pointing to). The next time you use the menu, that item will be pinned to the top, and will stay there until you highlight it and hit the Shift key again.
Other changes
Version 6.3 also shows the “where from” information that Safari and other browsers add to a file when you download it. And Default Folder X’s Finder-click feature will no longer obscure windows that float over Open and Save dialogs, allowing you to use other utilities while a file dialog is open. In addition, a number of bugs and issues have been addressed, so even if you aren’t running macOS 27, it may be worth grabbing this beta.
Version 6.2.8 of Default Folder X is available now, delivering a compatibility fix for the Finder-click feature when used with Path Finder 26 and a new Finder-click capability when used with Bloom.
The Finder-click feature, which allows you to click on a Finder, ForkLift, Path Finder or Bloom window to show the contents of that window in an Open or Save dialog, no longer worked in Path Finder because of changes that CocoaTech made in the latest Path Finder 26 release. The new version of Default Folder X accommodates those changes, making Finder-click work again.
When using Finder-click with Bloom, you can now turn on Bloom’s “Enable Precise Location Detection” setting (below) to let Default Folder X “see” multiple panes in each window. Clicking on a pane will take you to the folder shown in that pane rather than the folder in the pane that currently has keyboard focus.
Advanced Settings in Bloom
Default Folder X 6.2.8 also works around a bug in macOS Tahoe that often leaves column view scrolled all the way to the left in Open and Save dialogs. In order to see and select files and folders, you have to scroll to the right every . single . time. It’s a stupid, maddening little annoyance. Default Folder X works around this by automatically scrolling the columns to the right when a file dialog opens or when you switch to a new folder.
And because of another Tahoe bug, I’ve turned off playable previews of audio and video files. The system-provided AVPlayer controller, which DFX uses to display previews of these files, has been crashing frequently on Tahoe. The issue appears to be a problem with the player drawing SF Symbol images for the playback controls. When they can’t be displayed (it looks like the SF Symbol library is corrupted or unreadable on some Macs), the AVPlayer just aborts the entire host app – which means that Default Folder X just suddenly quits. To avoid the possibility of this happening, Default Folder X will just show static previews of audio and video files until Apple fixes the problem.
If you want to live dangerously, you can turn playable previews back on in Default Folder X by holding down the Option key and choosing Settings from Default Folder X’s menu in your menu bar. You’ll get this Additional Settings sheet – just turn on the “Show playable audio and video previews” checkbox and you’re good to go.
The rest of the changes in Default Folder X 6.2.8 are fixes for bugs that have been discovered in the past couple of months. These range from little annoyances to possible crashes, so I recommend that all Default Folder X users update – the update is free if you’ve already purchased a license for version 6.
All of the fixes are detailed in the change history shown on the What’s New page or when you choose Check for Update from Default Folder X’s menu in your menu bar.
Version 2.3.7 of HistoryHound is available, adding support for the latest AI-enabled browsers (Atlas, Comet, and Dia) as well as the more privacy-focused Helium browser.
In addition, this release fixes a problem with the search field “falling off” the right side of HistoryHound’s toolbar when window isn’t wide enough to show all the toolbar items. This was pretty confusing when it happened, because it defeats the whole point of HistoryHound if you can’t access the search field 🙄 A few other bugs were also fixed, and HistoryHound recognizes more types of login pages that prevent an URL from being properly indexed without a password.
This update is free for licensed HistoryHound users – if you’re already using HistoryHound, just choose Check for Update from its menu. If you’re not, you can download it from the What’s New page, as well as see a full version history.
A new public beta version of App Tamer 3.0 is available! The most visible change in recent builds is the ability to display the amount of RAM used by each process. To turn it on, Control-click in the stats area at the top of the window and select “Show Memory Usage”.
Note that the numbers can vary from what you see in Activity Monitor because App Tamer totals up the memory used by any sub-processes and helper apps that are employed by an app or process. It does the same with CPU usage. So the numbers you see for Safari, for example, are the sum of the memory and CPU used by Safari and all of its helper processes (Safari Networking, Safari Web Content, PluginLibraryService, etc). App Tamer will show you a list of these sub-processes if you Control-click on an app and choose “Process Details…” from the contextual menu.
But Wait, There’s More!
So what’s more exciting than that? Well, while adding the ability to collect memory information, I reexamined App Tamer’s process monitoring more generally. I revamped its CPU sampling code, making it more accurate and more efficient. And I eliminated some “slop” in the process throttling engine, allowing it to better control really CPU-hungry processes. Long story short, App Tamer is now much better at controlling CPU usage, keeping it very close to the limit you set rather than bouncing around the target value.
There are also UI improvements to make it easier to see the current temperature on the graph and a clearer indication of how processes are sorted in the process list. Organization of the options in the Stats pane of the Settings window is more logical, and a message at the bottom of the main window explains why Auto-Stop is paused when it’s inactive for some reason.
Share Your Hopes and Dreams (and Bugs)
This is a beta release, so I really want to hear from you if you’ve found a bug, or if you have suggestions or other feedback. Send an email to AppTamer@stclairsoft.com.
Download links and a full list of changes in the beta are available on the App Tamer Testing Page.
