If Apple has its way, then one day we will never save another document -- and we will never think about where it went. It will just be there when we want to open it again. That's nice. Until then, we open and save documents nearly as often as we check Facebook. Which makes it a shame that OS X rather fights us. You can open a document from this folder on that network drive and you can then save it on that folder on this USB stick, but it is a pain. Not much of a pain, let's not get carried away here, but try doing it twice and see how you feel. That's where
Default Folder X comes in.
I mention doing that save procedure twice because the second time you do that, it is exactly the same procedure. Even though you've just been to a folder, you're often back to exactly the same hunting and drilling through folders and dropdown menus to get there again. OS X Yosemite does include some recent folders in its dropdown, but if you are copying from Documents on a network drive to Documents on your Mac, that dropdown just says Documents twice. You've still got to go into each of them to see which is which.
We're used to it enough that we don't think about it -- and we've used Windows, we're fine here by comparison. But then, we use Default Folder X -- and it is a small change that makes a big difference. Choose File/Open from any Mac application, and then in the dialog box click and hold on the folder-name "lozenge" at the top. A dropdown menu appears that shows the same list of folders as OS X, but with disclosure arrows next to each of them.
Hover over an arrow, and the complete contents of that folder are shown to you in a menu that pops out to the side. Without leaving where you are, you can look through other folders. What's more -- what's actually much more -- is that each folder in that menu also has a disclosure triangle. Hover over that and you see the contents of the next folder, and the next, and the next.
We learnt today that our oldest documents are nine folders deep, and that with this app we could go straight to any of them immediately.
Default Folder X remembers where you've been, and it lets you set up favourite locations. That's in theory the same as OS X's Sidebar, that normally appears on the left of every Finder window. Similarly, Default Folder X's ability to show information about a folder, such as the disk space it takes up, can be done via the Finder.
It's just that Default Folder X does it faster enough that you stop thinking about it. There's no hunting any more, you are just straight there and straight back. Plus, you can tell Default Folder X that when you're in Word you usually want it to open your Documents folder, while in Excel you want it to find your Finances one. We had some display problems with Pages on OS X Yosemite, where we needed to swap to another application and back in order to see the controls. But this was infrequent, and we couldn't reproduce it reliably.
Default Folder X requires OS X 10.6 or above and costs $35. Call it a penny per use, and it'll have paid for itself in an hour. You can get used to not having it anymore, there have been prior apps like Boomerang that did similar things, but you will want to keep it. There's a trial version on
St Clair Software's official site.
Who Default Folder X is for:
Every one of us who spends all day opening and saving documents
Who Default Folder X is not for:
Truly disciplined types who work in one folder for hours at a time, those who work in document-making apps infrequently
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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