EagleFiler 1.4

The following was posted on the EagleFiler blog:

EagleFiler 1.4 is now available. This is a free update that includes the following enhancements:

Highlights

  • You can now create custom smart folders, which can contain an unlimited number of criteria, optionally using nested Any/All/None criteria. Creating and editing smart folders requires Mac OS X 10.5; however, once created, the smart folders can be used with Mac OS X 10.4.

  • Smart folders can now be organized into folders.

  • You can define actions
    to occur when you drag a record onto a smart folder. For example, you could make a smart folder that shows records with a certain combination of tags, and that will assign those tags to dragged records. - You can now create any type of new file from within EagleFiler. To do this, choose New Record ‣ Open Stationery Folder from the File
    menu. Whichever files you put in the Stationery folder become available as templates in the File ‣ New Record menu. - You can now drag messages out of mailboxes to convert them to freestanding .eml files. It’s less efficient to store messages individually rather than in mailbox files, but there are also several advantages: the messages can be stored alongside other types of files, they can be freely moved between folders, and they are searchable by Spotlight.

  • Added a Tag Cloud window, which shows a compact listing of all the tags. You can click on a tag to toggle whether it’s assigned to the selected record.

  • Added a Find
    panel for searching within PDFs and Web archives. - Added a preference to control which format Web pages are imported in. The supported formats are: Bookmark, PDF, Plain Text, Rich Text, Rich Text With Images, and Web Archive (the default).

  • Added a preference to control what happens to Spotlight comments when importing. This is useful, e.g. if you had already used another application to tag your files or if you had entered notes from the Finder. If you tell EagleFiler to Import as tags
    , each word is imported as a tag. If you tell it to Import as notes and tags, EagleFiler extracts tags (prefixed by & or marked using Punakea’s format) and imports the remaining comments text as notes. - Added commands to the contextual menus (Assign Tag
    , Set Filename, Set From, Set Title) so that you can quickly turn the selected text into metadata.
    File Formats

  • Added New Record ‣ Plain Text File command.

  • EagleFiler can now display Microsoft Word 2007 (.docx) files (requires Mac OS X 10.5).

  • EagleFiler can now display and edit OpenDocument Text (.odt) files (requires Mac OS X 10.5).

  • EagleFiler can now display and search XML and binary property list (.plist) files.

  • Now imports .webloc files as-is rather than converting them to Web archives.

  • EagleFiler now imports .eml files as-is rather than converting them to single-message mailboxes.

  • Bean documents are now imported as a separate file type rather than as RTFD.

Interface

  • Added Quick Look command, which opens a Quick Look preview of the selected records in a separate window (requires Mac OS X 10.5).

  • Added an Enclosing Record command in the View
    menu. Replaced the Select Source command with the similar but more useful Contents of Record command in the View menu. As a result, you can now use Command–Up Arrow and Command–Down Arrow to navigate up and down the hierarchy of folders and mailboxes. - Added Search for Selection
    contextual menu command. - When you mouse over a link in a Web view, EagleFiler now shows the URL at the bottom of the window.

  • Revised the toolbar icons and simplified the default toolbar configuration.

  • If there are no matches for a search, EagleFiler draws the records list background in yellow.

  • Adjusted the unread and flagged menu item titles and toolbar labels for consistency with Mail.

  • Increased the resolution of the Dock badges.

  • The viewer now shows some helpful text describing the “note” tag.

  • Moved Show Inspector
    and Show Tags from the Record menu to the Window menu and renamed Show Inspector to Show Info.
    Capture

  • Can now capture from Entourage, and preserves the message flags, categories, and projects. If you want EagleFiler to skip a message, you can assign it the category “OmitFromArchive”.

  • Can now capture from PowerMail, and preserves the message status and label.

  • Can now capture from Preview, if you make it scriptable.

  • Can now capture from Together, and preserves the tags, comments, labels, and ratings.

  • When capturing from Mailsmith, EagleFiler can now import individual messages (before, only mailboxes were supported), and it now preserves the message status, label, and notes.

  • When capturing from Camino, EagleFiler now reads the URL of the current tab rather than the first tab.

  • In the Capture With Options window, if you edit the tags and then choose a different library, EagleFiler no longer overwrites the tags with the default ones for the new library.

Importing

  • You can now import Web pages using bookmarklets.
  • Empty files and files that contain only a resource fork (such as font suitcases) no longer count as duplicates.
  • Added an esoteric preference for importing Spotlight keywords as tags.
  • When you try to import a file that’s already inside of the library folder, EagleFiler can now reveal the file in the browser window.
  • If a connection times out while EagleFiler is importing a Web page, it will now retry twice.
  • When importing bookmarks from a Web browser, EagleFiler now uses the titles you’ve assigned rather than fetching them from the Web.

Miscellaneous

  • Encrypted libraries can now be created as sparse bundle images, for more efficient Time Machine backups (requires Mac OS X 10.5).
  • Encrypted libraries can now use 256-bit rather than 128-bit encryption (requires Mac OS X 10.5).
  • You can now type tag names directly into an Anywhere
    search. - You can now view messages in Microsoft Entourage instead of Apple Mail (requires Mac OS X 10.5). To do this, Get Info
    on a .eml file in the Finder, choose Entourage from the Open with pop-up menu, and click Change All. - The Copy Record Link command now creates links using persistent IDs so that they will still work if you delete EagleFiler’s database and import the files into a new library.
  • Added How can I put my library on my iPhone? section to the manual.
  • Added Shortcuts section to the manual.
  • Added an esoteric preference to clear the search field when you select a different source.
  • You can now double-click a smart folder to open it in a new window.
  • EagleFiler now indexes a file’s Spotlight keywords for searching.
  • Improved auto-generated titles.
  • Improved the display of improperly encoded message headers.
  • Worked around a bug in Mac OS X 10.4 when highlighting matching search terms in the records list.
  • Removes stray index files when opening the library.
  • If there’s an error getting the downloads folder for a software update, EagleFiler now defaults to Downloads rather than Desktop.
  • No longer shows the deleted tag in the records list.
  • The Untagged
    source now shows records that only have the “note” tag. - Improved parsing of invalid mbox files.
  • Improved error reporting when downloading Web pages.
  • Rewrote filesystem code to improve performance and error reporting.
  • Made various changes to improve interface responsiveness.
  • Note files now include a relative URL to the file that they’re attached to, so that you can easily find the file if EagleFiler isn’t installed.
  • Added placeholder text to the Purchase window.
  • No longer lets Web pages steal focus from the records list.
  • You can now bring up the Find
    panel when the source list or records list has focus. - EagleFiler now saves damaged index files for possible future analysis of why Search Kit couldn’t open them. It also tries multiple times to open indexes, since Search Kit sometimes changes its mind about which indexes are valid.

Bug Fixes

  • If an unexpected error occurs while EagleFiler is emptying the trash, it no longer leaves the library in an inconsistent state. Also, EagleFiler will now detect and repair this sort of damage when opening a library.
  • Fixed a bug where a duplicate “From ” line could be inserted when generating an mbox file from an Apple Mail mailbox. This was harmless but unsightly.
  • Fixed a bug where, in rare cases, two messages imported from Apple Mail could be joined into one, so that it looked like some had been skipped.
  • Fixed a bug where EagleFiler changed the selection if you tried to delete a source and then cancelled.
  • Fixed a bug where Reveal in Finder didn’t work when KeePassX was running.
  • Fixed a bug where you could, via the contextual menu, open a different page when viewing a Web archive.
  • Fixed a bug where EagleFiler could freeze when revealing a non-existent file in the Finder.
  • Fixed a bug where EagleFiler’s Web fonts would not be consistent with Safari’s if you’d never changed the fonts in Safari’s preferences.
  • Fixed a bug where, when capturing multiple items with notes, some records without notes would be assigned the notes from one of the other records.
  • Fixed a bug where certain errors when creating a new library were not correctly reported.
  • Fixed a bug where the PDF viewer state wasn’t always preserved.
  • Fixed a bug where the title of text records wasn’t linked to the filename by default.
  • Fixed a bug where newly added tags weren’t selected if you had been renaming another tag.
  • Fixed a bug where EagleFiler could crash when closing a browser window.

Wow! Thanks a lot. I’m impressed over the wealth of new features and updates. Looks more like a 2.0 release than 1.4!

Since the update the toolbar icon for “Reveal in Library” (Errors window) is missing. Tiger.

towb: I’ve also had missing icons (for Zoom in and Zoom out in my case), and I fixed it by not doing the upgrade from EF itself: I downloaded the 1.4 dmg and installed it myself.

Michael: Thank you for this great update. It almost sounds like a 2.0 :wink:

I’m not seeing that problem on my Tiger Mac. Could you try downloading and installing a fresh copy and let me know if the icon is still missing?

The DMG that Sparkle downloaded is byte identical to the one linked from the homepage, including broken permissions of 600 instead of 644 on 5 *.icns files inside Resources. This only affects people wise enough not to work with an administrator account :wink:

Thanks for figuring it out. I think if you update by hand the Finder changes the permissions. I’ll fix them on the .dmg for 1.4.1.

(Just to be clear, EagleFiler doesn’t use Sparkle. It has its own auto-updater.)

No, that’d be very bad manners for a copying programme. But the resulting files will belong to the user who did the copying, and if that’s the one using EF in the end the 600 permissions are not a problem. Hence my mention of separate administrator accounts.

Right. If you auto-update, and if EagleFiler was not stored in your home folder, it will ask for a password and the resulting files will belong to an admin.

Ditto. There are several things I’d thought about asking about over the past several weeks (Camino and smart folder tagging abilities for example) that were included. Appreciate your continued innovation with EF, Michael.

Thanks for all the enhancements.

I notice the beach ball a lot more with this update. I have a large library and anytime I enter a search term whilst I’m in the root, it’ll start searching after I’ve entered 3 letters of the search term - then 15seconds of beach ball - then it finds enormous numbers of documents with those 3 letters, then it lets me enter the whole of my search term, and another 15 seconds of beach ball and I have the proper search results. I’m sure everything was a lot snappier in the previous version.

In general, 1.4 should be both faster and snappier at most tasks. I think the only search-related change was that 1.4 will also search the tags when doing an Anywhere search. Does it help to turn off Match Partial Words?

Yes - turning off partial word match has made it very much better - back to what it was before.

I suspect somebody is going to have this turned on and think that the program runs like a dog - might need a warning or something similar.

Both of these issues are addressed in EagleFiler 1.4.1.

Problem solved. Many thanks

I’m using a smart folder to find all EF libraries, like Kinkless. The update broke this and I had to re-create it.

For some stupid reason smart folders seem to store the type description rather than name. For other unfathomable reasons my account, that was originally setup in German but switched to English later, still uses that language in odd places.

Maybe EF 1.4 changed something about the localization, in any case smart folders for “EagleFiler Library” no longer work and had to be changed to “EagleFiler-Bibliothek”.

I’m not complaining, but if someone else encounters this, there you have it.

The English and German localizations for EagleFiler’s library file type have never changed.