Here’s a laundry list of issues/suggestions I’ve found with EagleFiler over the last couple of weeks. Some may have been already covered in these forums, and if so, I apologize for duplicating them. EagleFiler seems like the best of all the OS X organizers, so I imagine I’ll end up using it a lot, and would like it to get even better. So here’s some stuff to chew on.
Items are in order of priority:
-
Star Ratings. I know we already have tags and labels, but star ratings would actually be a very useful addition as an organizational tool. And given that everyone using OS X is well accustomed to star ratings, they would be used by many. iTunes shows the way forward here.
-
Esoteric Pref to hide file extension display in EagleFiler. (I prefer to view the records list by “File” rather than by “Title” so that if I edit the name in the records list, I’m actually editing the name of the file in the file system.) I can already see the file icons to know what kind of file I’m dealing with, and can even enable the “Kind” column if I wish, so having the extensions visible is just a distraction.
-
Every Folder and/or Smart Folder should be able to have its own sort and column selections, rather than just having one global sort and column selection. iTunes shows the way forward here.
-
Esoteric Pref to have EagleFiler hide file extensions in the Finder for files it creates. In other words, if I create a new RTF doc or import a web PDF, I’d like to have them created with file extensions hidden in the file system.
-
A smart folder criteria to see documents by relative date. aka, I’d like to be able to see all documents modified (or added) within the past 4 days, which doesn’t seem currently possible.
-
There should be some way of actually turning OFF the record viewer pane, not just making it zero pixels high. Even though you can’t see it, as you arrow up and down through your list, EF is taking up bandwidth, memory, and cycles to display the docs. (I could be wrong about this…)
-
Startup is just too slow. I understand many will keep the app open all the time, but some folks won’t, for reasons both bad and good. If there is some magic to display the interface quicker and do the necessary sanity checks while the user begins to work, that might some kind of solution. The only other apps that have startup this slow come from Adobe and Microsoft.
-
Item selection should persist through restarts. If I’m viewing document “test” in the record viewer and quit EagleFiler, the next time I launch the app, I should be viewing document “test” in the record viewer.
-
It’d be nice to be able to open a record viewer window without a source list and record list - aka just the document alone. I know most viewing/editing is designed to be done in other apps, but sometimes it’d be nice to see your document in a clean window inside EF.
And finally, since I’m making endless requests, I’ll add another request that I managed to solve myself via AppleScript that I can share with the community.
I like to be able to navigate via the keyboard, and so I want to be able to shift focus from the source list to the records list via keyboard, and then be able to up and down arrow through the list, and then shift focus back. Since the Tab key doesn’t work this way in EF, I created an AppleScript to toggle the focus. Trigger the AS through any of the various keyboard AS trigger apps available for OS X. I assigned it to the Tab key. (I’d suggest actually having menu commands to do this in the View menu for folks who don’t want to deal with AS, but in the meantime, the following should take care of the problem.)
activate application “EagleFiler”
tell application “System Events”
tell process “EagleFiler”
set x to title of every window whose description is "standard window"
set x to item 1 of x
if focused of outline 1 of scroll area 1 of window x then
set focused of table 1 of scroll area 2 of window x to true
else
set focused of outline 1 of scroll area 1 of window x to true
end if
end tell
end tell