• If you have a folder on your desktop whose name is the same as one of your mounted volumes, control-clicking on it results in a “Contents” submenu which refers to the disk, not the folder you clicked on. This appears to be a system software bug; I’ve filed a bug report at Apple.
• 68K support? Coming as soon as I figure out what’s really going on down in the bowels of Finder8 and CFM68K, and as soon as I can get my hands on a 68K box for a weekend or two. Working in the Apple manufacturing plant in Ireland certainly had its advantages — machines of all sorts were available! Here in Cupertino, my development machine’s a Powerbook, FFS. With tiny Japanese Keyboard where typing non-alphanumeric characters is an entertaining “seek ye the key”-style game as the key caps bear no relation to the characters they produce. And don’t get me started on the screen. Moan, grumble, gripe…
• At the risk of stating the obvious, if you’re displaying the FinderPop Items embedded directly in the main popup menu and the FinderPop Items folder is empty, there will be no FinderPop Items added to the menu. (Other submenus, like the Processes and Volumes submenus, will be at their usual spots if you have enabled them.)
Some people who wished for only the “Contents” submenu without any extraneous FinderPop submenus can now have their wishes fulfilled. In a roundabout fashion — the result of a happy accident.
• FinderPop maintains two caches: one for menus it has built up, and one for icons. If you ever need to flush these caches, simply open the control panel, turn FinderPop off and then back on again immediately. The next time you Control-click, all FinderPop’s menus and icons will be rebuilt from scratch.
• FinderPop checks that its menu hierarchy caches are up-to-date by looking at the folder being cached’s modification date. Unfortunately, renaming an item in (for example) the “FinderPop Items Folder” doesn’t affect the folder’s modification date; you can force the folder’s mod date to change by creating a new folder and then immediately deleting it (Command-N, Command-Delete.)
• The Menu Manager will only display a maximum of 5 hierarchical menus at one time, so not all levels of a deep hierarchy can be displayed. I’m looking into extending this; one incredibly skanky method springs to mind…
• Menus are now (1.3b0) built on-the-fly one level at a time, so you may sometimes notice a pause as you navigate into a large hierarchy. Menus are still cached, however, so you should only see this happening once — unless the folder is changing.
• Want to speed up FinderPop’s building of a complicated menu hierarchy? Make sure the disk cache in the Memory control panel is set to some reasonable value -- for example, by clicking the “Use Defaults” button. 96K is not a reasonable value; my rule of thumb is to use one sixteenth of my physical memory up to a max of 2048K.
• Copying/aliasing/moving from a tabbed folder doesn’t appear to work. (The folder appears to close before the Finder can respond to the AppleEvents FinderPop sends to it.) At first glance, this appears to be a Finder bug, but I’m looking into it! Latest: this is indeed a Finder bug; apparently to be fixed in 8.0.1 or 8.1 or whatever it is they’re calling it this week.
• Holding down the Option Key while the Process submenu is active will display balloons which show the memory usage of a process. For some bizarre reason, you may need to depress it a few times, and move the mouse over to one edge or other of the menu item. A low-priority fix, but I’ll get around to it.
• Holding down the mouse button during startup will disable FinderPop.
• The “FinderPop Items Folder” in the Preferences folder can itself be an alias.
• FinderPop currently has no knowledge about which documents are openable by which applications, so it may be possible to ‘open’ a document using an inappropriate application. This will also be fixed in a future version (i.e., applications which can’t open what’s selected in the Finder can be disabled or removed from FinderPop menus.)
• Some people state that FinderPop fails to load with a “Couldn’t Prepare Code Fragment” error. I have not ever seen a case of this, but people to whom this has happened state that by getting FinderPop to load later (e.g., by renaming it to “~FinderPop” or “zzFinderPop”) seems to fix this problem. Some helpful user sent me a Macsbug StdLog of his crash, and it looks like the system was unable to prepare ObjectSupportLib, an AppleScript library which is in the System File under Mac OS 8. Bizarre. I’m investigating. This should be fixed in version 1.5f3; please contact me if you encouter this again!
• Plotting colour icons in the FinderPop submenu -- things might look a tad strange in right-to-left text systems due to the skanky method I use to draw the icons for folders. As soon as I get around to locating a right-to-left MacOS 8 system, I'll do further testing. But be warned...
