Version 1.5.8 Thursday 26 February — the “blatant commercial sell-out” edition
Hello and welcome to the slightly better organised manual, formed by taking the old ReadMe and banging at it with a piece of two-by-four. Complaints, clarifications, bugs, omissions, rephrasings of my deathless — if only for sheer turgidity — and tenebrous prose all welcome at turly@geocities.com.
See also the webpage at http://bounce.to/turly (a bit easier to remember than all that wretched geocities gobbledegook, even if you do have to look at an advertisement for five seconds…)
Unfortunately, my spare time is at a premium as I’m trying to find somewhere to live and dealing with banks/solicitors/estate agents, etc., has me coming out in a rash. (A minor update — I thought I’d found somewhere reasonable, put a deposit on it but never signed anything, paid large amounds of dosh for legal fees, valuation fees and structural survey, etc., and now am basically being told to get stuffed. 10 weeks wasted and now I have to start all over again, dammit. Moan, whinge, etc. Where’s me Kalashnikov? :-)
What is it?
FinderPop 1.5.8 extends the Mac OS 8 Finder’s contextual menus. Features include: user-selectable contextual menu font/size/icon size, automagic CM popup by clicking and holding without having to press the control key, and a number of optional submenus — including Processes, contents of selected folder, Finder windows, FinderPop, and Desktop. Additionally, it greatly enhances navigation via the Standard File dialogs.
Features
Just thought I’d list the major features of FinderPop here, as this manual has become very badly organised (“badly disorganised”?)…
• Control-free CMM popup — just click and hold — now works in many more apps; apple data detectors become even handier!
• Command-click and hold a folder to get a popup of its contents (or command-control-click for an immediate contents popup.)
• Selectable Font/Size for FinderPop submenus
• Process, Contents, Windows, FinderPop and Desktop submenus
• Move, Copy, Alias or Open items selected in Finder to any item in the FinderPop hierarchy (see Power User Topics chapter)
• Control-clicking in unused menubar area pops up CMM in any app
• Grab and drag — “grab” an item in a FinderPop menu and drag it around to do with as you will…
• Standard File enhancement — click and hold on a folder in Standard File to see (and select from) its contents!
• You can now select items from the FinderPop menus (e.g., by control-clicking an unused portion of the menubar) while the Standard File dialogs are up — whatever you select will be “opened.”
What’s New?
FinderPop 1.5.8 (Thursday 26 Feb) fixes a problem with the Menuette control panel (among other things.)
[Saturday night, 4:15 AM] A Paddy MacHackery special: you can now click-and-hold on an existing selection in most applications without the dreaded “oh no! my selection has become deselected” just before the contextual menu pops up…
You can now Command-Control-click a folder in the Finder for an immediate contents popup. In Standard File dialogs, command-clicking a folder in the list will bring an immediate contents popup.
Note new Apple Data Detectors address: http://applescript.apple.com/data_detectors/
FinderPop 1.5.7 (Friday 13 Feb —wooo! tempting fate or what?) should be a tiny bit quicker and a good bit more robust. Also, you can now command-click and hold a folder in the Finder to get a popup of its contents. Revampled * one or two sections of the manual (the website address may be changing soon...)
Still haven’t had the spare time to implement the new “tabbed” user interface, I’m afraid...
FinderPop 1.5.6 (30 Jan) does a better job of enhancing the standard file dialogs — click and hold on a folder in a file Open… or Save… dialog and be presented with a popup menu displaying the folder’s contents; select a file from it and, voila, it’s opened!
The Standard File “Contents” popup menus should now work as expected in all cases (thanks to John Gotow for a handy hint — I owes ya a pint, John :-).
The “Contents” submenu, which normally only appears if you have selected a folder in the Finder, can now be made to appear if you just click in a Finder window (without selecting anything.) This can be handy if you just want to “view by name” quickly in order to locate something.
You can now have an optional “Put Away” menu item, for when you’ve selected something in the Finder whose “home” directory isn’t where it currently is. This also works for disks and network volumes — just like selecting “Put Away” from the File Menu. I was amazed at the number of people who asked for this — lads, in all fairness, have yez considered pressing Command-Y? But it was easy to add, so I did :-).
Finally, I made a number of other improvements — hopefully I haven’t broken anything in the process. The “More Settings” user interface — to which you’ll have recourse if you want to use any of the new features here — is getting worse; I’ll have to redesign the entire control panel when the “More Settings” dialog starts getting too big for a 640*400 monitor (which should be about March/April at the current rate of progress.)
FinderPop 1.5.5 (8 Jan) was the initial attempt at enhancing the standard file Open/Close dialogs.
FinderPop 1.5.4 (2 Jan) was only released as an alpha (well, actually, two alphas) with some very hairy bugs.
FinderPop 1.5.3 (8 Dec) should fix the “Empty Trash” bug introduced in the last version. Sorry about that…
If you’re one of the kind people who’ve localised FinderPop and want to do this version, the only thing that’s changed from 1.5.1 is the addition of the “Empty Trash” string in the STRs resource.
FinderPop 1.5.2 (24 Nov) is the latest entrant in my attempt to keep the great volunteer crew of localisers busy — nothing’s changed on the UI front, lads! :-)
It fixes a number of minor bugs, adds an “Empty Trash” feature (only if you have the “Desktop” submenu enabled.) “Grabbing” should now work all the time instead of intermittently as it did previously.
Oh yeah, a number of people didn’t know that you can cancel any drag-and-drop operation by “dropping” the item being dragged into the menubar, so I thought it might be worth mentioning.
Additionally, it’s probably a good idea to highlight the fact that you need Apple’s Internet Address Detector stuff (available at
http://applescript.apple.com/data_detectors/) to get FinderPop working in non CMM-aware apps. Note that IAD is incompatible with some apps such as Quark XPress which use Control-Clicking — John Moe, moejo@post.uwstout.edu, has written a freebie control panel, IADD, which lets you turn off IAD for selected apps. It’s available at http://www.luminet.net/~dmoe/iadd.sit.hqx
Thank you Mr. Moe.
Matthieu Baudoux, matthieub@skynet.be, has kindly set up *FinderPop Announce*, a read-only mailing list to which you might like to subscribe in order to receive information about the availability of new versions of FinderPop.
To subscribe, send a mail to <requests@lists.qwentes.be> with the following message in the body of your mail :
subscribe finderpop
To unsubscribe, send a mail to <requests@lists.qwentes.be> with the following message in the body of your mail :
unsubscribe finderpop
FinderPop 1.5.1 should improve stability, and fixes a couple of bugs.
FinderPop 1.5 final (5 Nov) is the same as 1.5f11 with just a name change. I will post this to InfoMac, and will contact the people who volunteered to localise FinderPop to ask them to localise this version.
Hey, by the way, did you know that there have been — count ’em — 18 versions of FinderPop in the last 13 weeks? Now I’m heading back to Cork and a social life, this rate will be somewhat reduced… :-)
FinderPop 1.5f11 hopefully fixes a problem with St. Clair Software’s nifty-looking Sleeper control panel (and probably a few other apps also.)
Went to an interesting Halloween party in Oakland… Quite entertaining; everyone there seemed to be enjoying themselves; some of the music was quite good, too! Didn’t think much of yer man Josh Wink, though ;-)
FinderPop 1.5f10 fixes a couple of embarrassing bugs (eg, you were not able to switch off the “clicking in unused menubar area” feature) Implements new algorithm to check whether a piece of menubar real estate is, in fact, “unused.” Sports a new, snazzy-looking icon courtesy of Will Cosgrove.
Unless people report major showstopping bugs, this will become 1.5 FINAL next week. (Or unless I go mad over the weekend and start implementing new stuff...)
Oh yeah, one other thing, would the person who posted 1.5f7 to InfoMac using my name and email address please desist? I know you meant well, but I was hoping to give ’em 1.5 Final instead of all these half-baked version numbers. If you do think it’s worthwhile to post an interim version, please do so with your name, not mine! Thank you.
FinderPop 1.5f9 has a completely rewritten low-level trap patching mechanism in an attempt to get it working in apps other than the Finder. This works relatively well for non-CMM-aware apps if used in conjunction with Apple’s Internet Data Detectors (available at
http://www.macos.apple.com/macos8/iad/). Grabbing seems to work a bit more reliably (and in colour!) One minor tweak to the font stuff might make things even better for OS8/J users. You can now control-click (or click and hold) in the unused portion of the menubar and have the Contextual Menu drop down. Lots of other minor tweaks, etc. If there are no showstopping bugs (hah!), I’ll release this version as 1.5 Final next week (and would-be localisers can contact me then.)
As usual, you’ll have to pay a visit to the ever more crowded “More Settings” dialog to enable some of these features.
Just back from a weekend in San Diego. One cool city, and I don't mean that in the thermal sense — the weather was superb; the thermometer didn’t say so, but the sun seemed to be far hotter there than it is up here in Cupertino. Even ran into a FinderPop user in a pub (Hi Tim, and thanks for the pints!) Small world.
FinderPop 1.5f8 should fix the odd font behaviour seen by Japanese users, plus a couple of other bugs. It also adds a first stab at “Grabbing” — press the ‘G’ key when you have something selected in a FinderPop submenu, and you can pick it up and drag it around the Finder, to do with what you will.
My apologies for the user interface, which is again becoming more cluttered. I will redesign this sometime after I get back to Cork in mid-November.
A “Marketing Slogans” chapter has been added. I’ve made the “What’s New” section blue to make it stand out.
On a brighter note, it may interest regular readers of the FinderPop saga that I finally found a place that sells Beamish Stout on draught in San Francisco! My first pint of Beamish since August 4! <f/x: lip-smacking sounds> And it wasn’t bad, either — better than their Guinness, anyway, although I suspect my tastebuds were in tatters by that stage. I think the place was called “Lucky 13” or something (possibly at Market and Church?) In any event, I recommend that any fine beer connoisseurs amongst you give this stout a try. One caveat: an ideal pint of Beamish (would be 20 fluid ounces, but that's another matter :-) should have a creamy “collar” less than 1 inch high, and not a three-inch job like they gave me. Or tried to — once they heard my accent I think they realised I wasn’t some gullible non-stout drinker...
FinderPop 1.5f7 hopefully fixes the odd behaviour seen by some unfortunates in the “Desktop” submenu.
FinderPop 1.5f6 fixes the embarassing ‘every alias is italicised’ bug; sorry about that. As we say in the trade, “Duhh.”
FinderPop 1.5f5 should fix the menu font/size problems that some people were experiencing. I tried about five different ways before finally remembering the way the old comms toolbox MDEF did it. Duhhh. It also finally implements the Desktop submenu.
I’ll have to redesign the user interface some more, but I thought I’d get the bugs fixed first.
FinderPop 1.5f4 was released only to a couple of people who’d experienced bugs — basically testing a couple of bugfixes.
FinderPop 1.5f3 is now freeware! This version should fix the annoying “couldn’t load code fragment” startup errors which some people were getting. It also adds a first stab at some extra features; these will be expanded over the coming weeks.
FinderPop 1.5f2 is no longer “PintWare”, I have contacted those who have registered so I can return their registrations. It is now freeware again! Because I’m currently working for Apple, this is probably the best way to avoid any perceived conflict of interest. Although this will probably change! In fact, it has, but not so’s anyone would notice — see the last page of this manual for details.
FinderPop 1.5f1 fixes a couple of cosmetic mini-icon bugs, and allows application launching to occur from the main menu even if there is no Process menu (thanks, Stephen Giles.)
FinderPop 1.5f0 has a revamped and simplified user interface, and allows you to display the FinderPop Items embedded directly inside the Finder’s contextual popup menu as opposed to inside a “FinderPop” submenu. 1.5f0 also supports generic icons and selectable menu fonts and sizes, and has a number of other bugfixes.
Oh yeah, it’s also “PintWare” — it’s still free, but if you’d like the opportunity to express your gratitude and get me a couple of pints, you can do so by registering it via Kagi for $7 (the price of two US pints of Murphy’s in Fibbar Magee’s — hey, why are US pints a wimpy 16 fluid ounces? :-). You are under no obligation to register it; this is strictly for the people who wanted to send me “something cool”, but got put off by the postage costs, hassle, etc.
There is no functional difference between PintWare-registered and “normal” FinderPops. Other than the glowing feeling in the depths of your soul if you got me a pint, that is.
See the FinderPop AboutBox or the last page of this manual for details.
What’s Coming?
Christmas, and the goose is getting fat.
More and more features. I now have a feature “wish list” the length of my arm (but still welcome other submissions.) Certain features of the late and apparently much lamented PopupFolder are well represented in this list. Some of the more obvious features which should eventually appear:
• Grab-and-drag — “grabbing” an item from within a FinderPop submenu will “pick it up”; you’ll then be able to drag the icon around as if you’d picked it up in the Finder. Hopefully — this is still being worked out.
• Advanced FinderPop Settings — a new dialog which will allow you to fine-tune various aspects of FinderPop operation.
• Memory — if you opened a document with a certain application last time, and control-click a document of the same type again, FinderPop will remember this and automagically add the application to the main CMM menu, and have the mouse positioned over the relevant item in the menu, so all you need do is release the mouse button.
• Disable inappropriate applications — if you have a Finder icon selected, inappropriate apps will be disabled or removed from the FinderPop submenu. (E.g., SimpleText isn’t really appropriate for Word documents, so why present you with the choice?)
• Ability for FinderPop to operate in applications other than the Finder.
This could build on Apple’s new Internet Address Detector stuff…
• Embedded Application Menus — i.e., have the Finder menus appear in the CMM popup menu. A minor convenience, but one that a number of people have asked for.
• Background Menu Caching — FinderPop submenus will be capable of being built in the background during idle time.
• More options for menu organisation (along the lines of Fabien Octave’s cool BeHierarchic, which I had never seen until today — thanks, AA.)
Feel quite free to contact me with feature requests (see the last chapter, “Contact Info”), but please don’t expect miracles. There’s only one of me — admittedly quite a bit more of me now after thirteen weeks of American-sized meals, and no soccer matches three times a week…
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* Whaddya mean “Revampled” isn’t a word? :-) "Revamped" + "Trampled" = "Revampled". So there.
