I've just released FolderGlance 2.5.3. This version improves the overall performance of FolderGlance. It also resolves a few bugs, including one that sometimes made FolderGlance unable to display the correct name for a file or folder. This bug usually affected multi-byte encoded file and folder names, and was triggered whenever FolderGlance tried to abbreviate such file or folder names.

You can read more about FolderGlance or download it here.

I released a minor update to FolderGlance today. The new version fixes a few bugs, making it possible to use more than one separator in your custom folder list and fixing a problem with keeping track of the current Finder selection. The new version also adds the ability to have files and applications in your list of custom folders, as well as support for file previews in the root context menu. Check it out or download it now!

I'm pleased to announce the release of FolderGlance 2.5, whose main new feature is its ability to run on Snow Leopard. Judging by the volume of e-mail I have received, I know that many of you have been waiting for a Snow Leopard compatible version of FolderGlance. The new version is available for download as a zipped disk image, or you can visit the FolderGlance product page.

The new version does not add many other new features, apart from the ability to generate previews using QuickLook and an on/off toggle to turn FolderGlance on and off. It retains most of the features from its Leopard ancestor, although I have had to remove the language localizations and change some features due to the re-write that was necessary to bring FolderGlance to Snow Leopard. The most substantial non-feature related change is that FolderGlance now is a commercial product. The trial version that is available online limits the maximum number of sub-folders you can dig down into and includes purchase reminders. You can purchase a license online to unlock the full capabilities of FolderGlance on Snow Leopard. The earlier version for Mac OS X 10.5 and earlier remains free as before (although it will not work on Mac OS X 10.6 and later). One license is $20.

Happy FolderGlance'ing!

So, there was no new Apple Tablet announced at yesterday's "It's Only Rock and Roll" event, which is pretty much as expected. However, there is one piece of information in the public developer documentation that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere that adds further creedence to the existence of such a tablet, and it's (more or less) impending release: Behold, the iPhone multi-touch API is now available on Snow Leopard.

The following methods were added to the NSResponder interface in Snow Leopard:

• - (void)touchesBeganWithEvent:(NSEvent *)event
• - (void)touchesMovedWithEvent:(NSEvent *)event
• - (void)touchesCancelledWithEvent:(NSEvent *)event
• - (void)touchesEndedWithEvent:(NSEvent *)event

Why would Apple include these methods if a multi-touch capable Mac (and I'm not talking about the laptop multi-touch trackpads now, people) were not in the works?

So Snow Leopard is out, and of course a number of applications and essential system add-ons stop working. One of those add-ons is FolderGlance, which I'm the author of. Starting with Snow Leopard, three major things have changed that all impact the degree to which FolderGlance can continue to work:

1. Almost all apps are now 64-bit by default, which includes the Finder where FolderGlance operates. Since Snow Leopard doesn't support mixed-mode binaries, 64-bit apps can't load 32-bit plug-ins and vice versa. At best, a recompile is all that is necessary. Often, though, additional changes to the code are required.
2. In Snow Leopard, the Finder has been "re-written" in Objective-C and Cocoa. (I'm putting re-written in quotes there, because the past few days of reverse engineering have taught me that while a substantial part of the Finder is now Cocoa-fied, large swaths of legacy Carbon code remain.) For a plug-in like FolderGlance, which relies heavily on the Carbon menu and event frameworks, this presents a challenge.
3. Finally, Snow Leopard removes all support for Contextual Menu Items for 64-bit processes. Oops. That means that even if the two above issues could be solved, there still wouldn't be a way to actually have FolderGlance do its magic, since there simply is no way to modify the Finder's contextual menu.

Luckily, there are ways around all of these issues. FolderGlance has no 64-bit issues at all, which is nice and refreshing. (I'm patting myself on the back here.) Further, I'm currently in the process of re-writing FolderGlance in Objective-C. This task is not as large as it sounds, as most of the existing code - the guts of FolderGlance, as it were - is being reused. I hope to have something release-worthy available soon, even if it may only be a beta.

Finally, and most importantly, I have found a way to handle the problem of Contextual Menu Items not being supported in Snow Leopard. I'll be writing a blog post about that topic when the first Snow Leopard-ready version of FolderGlance is out; in the meantime, I'll leave a teaser screenshot here showing FolderGlance browsing my local disk.

FolderGlance running on Snow Leopard. As an added "feature," FolderGlance now puts the Finder's context menus in a menu of its own, under the Finder submenu. My disk, fourlights, appears twice since I also have it in my list of custom folders.