Yesterday, I released FolderGlance 3.0 (along with a redesign of the Yellow Lemon Software website - though my blog will keep its current design for now). The new version has been a long time coming. I did an interview with MacTech last May, guesstimating that FolderGlance 3 would arrive "sometime this summer" - this summer being last summer. Well, it's here now, and I urge you to give it a go.

A screenshot of FolderGlance 3.0 previewing an image.

So, what's new? Well, the new version has two main new features, in addition to sporting a completely redesigned preference pane. The first is the new menu extra, which gives you access to custom folders, volumes and Spotlight search results from your menu bar. You can browse things as normal - the main difference is that the menu extra doesn't pick up the current selection from the Finder. Implementing the Spotight functionality - especially the user interface, believe it or not - was a very interesting challenge, and I'm not entirely certain that I've nailed it 100% yet, though at least for me, it works very well. My trials and tribulations implementing the text entry and menu item for this will hopefully be the subject of a future blog post (though, given my track record on predicting new versions of FolderGlance, it might take some time).

The other new feature which I'm really excited about is scripts. When Apple launched Snow Leopard, they also removed support for Contextual Menu Items. I managed to work around that limitation with FolderGlance, but I still wanted more options for customizing my menu beyond what could be done with Services. A step along that path is support for custom, context-sensitive scripts. Scripts in FolderGlance can operate on the current selection, the parent folder of the current selection, or on folders you browse to. FolderGlance ships with two simple scripts, and an additional two sample scripts to demonstrate what you can do with the new support for scripts. Scripts that don't operate on the selection also work in the menu extra, by the way.

The first script simply calculates the total disk usage for items in the current selection. The C++ source code for this script is on the disk image, if you want to understand how it works or customize its output. The Open Terminal script is available in any folder you browse to, and lets you open a Terminal session with the working directory set to the folder you browsed to.

The two additional sample scripts, which are not installed by default, demonstrate how you can use FolderGlance's script support to build your own menu hierarchies in the Finder's context menu. If you do anything cool with this, feel free to let me know!

If you want to learn more about FolderGlance, check out the screencast, look at the screenshots or give it a go here: http://www.scsc.no/products/folderglance/

Enjoy the new version!