Localization, infrastructure updates, Find Window improvements, and a piece of big news
The Features
Find Window - Name Search History
Previously, I implemented the history as a naive search history without really checking how it worked in File Buddy 10. Unfortunately, once I started poking at File Buddy 10 a bit more, I found that the history did more than just the text, even though it only shows the text that was searched.
I decided to remove the naive implementation I already had on the last release so that I could do it right. File Buddy 11 improves on the name history in File Buddy 10 by having the menu contain a description of the criteria that was used, not just the text of the search.
Find Window - Automatic Criteria Enabling
As I was poking at File Buddy 10’s history menu, I noticed that the enabled checkbox for each criteria was automatically toggling based on editing the criteria. For text fields, it automatically enabled when the text field has something in it and any changes are made, then disabled if all the text was removed. For dropdown fields, it would enable if you changed the selection. It also enables when a history item is selected.
Improved Localization (especially French)
I was going to push out this release last weekend, but I started having a back and forth with Phillipe, File Buddy’s French translator (quick shout out to MacVF). He helped me identify a lot of places that weren’t localizable or didn’t resize things to handle localized labels and buttons.
I spent a bunch of time this week tracking them down from his screenshots and making sure that the localization files were updated. He also sent me an updated set of translations. I did add some new values in the history feature that I don’t have translations for yet, but until we reach final release, it’s expected that the localization lags behind the features a bit. As you can see, his efforts help a lot:
Bugfixes
- Find Window Item Kind criteria had a bug that skipped adding the item kind criteria to the search, even if the checkbox was checked and it didn’t register changes to the dropdown. Now, the item kind will be applied to the search correctly.
- Rename Dialog - Certain characters had to be escaped to match in the name. This happened because under the hood, all transformations are converted to regular expressions and some characters have special meanings. Now, those special characters are handled correctly and will be matched without any special escaping.
- Rename Confirmation Dialog
- Positioning issue has been fixed.
- Automatically closes when “Rename All” is used
- Positioning issue has been fixed.
- Fixed 6 crash reports from a variety of causes, mostly around Objective-C interacting with Swift
Known Issues
- Find results on El Capitan do not match File Buddy 10. This was reported to me, but I haven’t been able to reproduce the issue myself. I haven’t yet had time to investigate this issue. If you see this, feel free to send me screenshots of the differences in results and I’ll see if that helps me reproduce it. I’ll also look at adding some additional logs to help me understand what was found and why some things may be passed over.
- Random crashes in various windows. I have crash reports for several different types of crashes, but none of them have clear causes. Some are connected to Objective-C generated code, others to what may be hardware issues. I’m working to triage these issues and find what solutions I can.
The Big News
After spending the last couple of years working on this project, I have finally decided to drop support for macOS 10.9 for File Buddy 11. I did not come to this decision lightly, and I know some of you out there are disappointed. The main reasons for this decision is the lack of support in the Swift community. Most libraries are only avaialable for macOS 10.10 and later, including those available from Apple. In an effort to stop rebuilding wheels that other people have already done well, I finally made the decision.
From a practical standpoint, this shouldn’t have a huge impact on users. File Buddy 10 supports 10.9 fully. Based on my research, things like Finder Tags and APFS all came in macOS 10.11+, so there shouldn’t be any new features in File Buddy 11 or Finder that would be available on 10.9 anyway.
What’s Next
I have fixed most of the known issues that have been reported by users thus far. Thanks again to all of you who have sent me bug reports and screenshots and thanks to everyone who is willing to submit crash reports. The Find Window has a lot of criteria left to add, so that’s where I’ll be focusing my efforts for the moment. I’ll also be trying to make progress on the Cleaning menu, since some of those options are related to finding. Not planning on the duplicates stuff just yet, but we’ll get there.
– David
PS - Mailing List
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PPS - Build Issues
I had some issues with my normal build process due to some new Xcode stuff. The app should work fine, but if you have any problems installing the update or running it, let me know.