Product Reviews

Many utilities have attempted to improve upon the Mac OS's Open and Save dialog boxes, the most famous being SuperBoomerang, part of Now Utilities. However, it was buggy, crashed a fair bit, and, to cap it all, about two years ago Now Utilities went into limbo and lost all sense of direction.

Now PowerON Software, with the help of some ex-Now Utilities engineers, has come up with ACTION Files, an enhancement to the standard File dialog box which is everything SuperBoomerang should have been, and more.

The premise is simple: to aid navigation of multi-gigabyte file systems through the standard File dialog box, and to add file management utilities to it. To this end it adds a menu bar to each dialog box, and displays extra information, such as size and date modified, about files and folders, Finder-style, in resizeable columns in the main dialog window. The dialog window is also resizable through a window-style drag box, and has an additional horizontal scrollbar. Again, like the Finder, items can be viewed according to name, size, and so on by clicking on the appropriate column, and the viewing order can be reversed by clicking on the Stack icon above the vertical scrollbar.

This is all very nice, but the real power of ACTION Files lies in the menu bar. From the left there are items for File, Edit, View Folders, Documents and Finder. File permits renaming, deleting, duplicating, making aliases, emptying the Wastebasket and so on, from the dialog box. It also contains an incredibly powerful Find routine which allows up to 14 separate search criteria to be chained together. Results are listed in a split pane, and clicking on a found item opens its folder in the dialog window.

The Edit menu contains the standard Cut, Copy and Paste commands, which allow you to, say, cut from one directory, navigate to another and paste the file or folder there. Most importantly, there are commands to Add as Favourite and Add as Recent, which work in conjunction with the Folders and Documents menus.

Folders lists the most

ADVERTISEMENT

recent folders you've used in the current application up to a user-defined limit, so hopping around between current work folders, even though they're widely separated, is a moment's work. What's more, you can define certain folders to be 'Favourites' so they appear permanently at the head of the menu, tagged by a bullet, and are always available from any application.

The Documents menu does the same for documents, with the added advantage that choosing a document from the list will open it. The Finder menu allows you to open the current folder in the Finder, and contains a list of all currently open Finder windows. Selecting one will open it in the Dialog window.

Those are the basics, but version 1.1 has a few significant extras. First is stability. Version 1.0 did very occasionally crash - to be expected for a first release - but 1.1 is absolutely rock solid. True, this may vary according to your system and extensions, but we tested it with everything but the kitchen sink loaded, and had no problems whatsoever.

In usability terms, you can now double- or option-click on the greyed-out name of a file in a Save dialog box and ACTION Files will copy the file's name to the name field. Great if you're performing Save As with sequential numberings. You can also set the default behaviour of Save As to Replace rather than Cancel. This means that when the confirmation dialog box appears, Replace will be highlighted, and can be selected by hitting return, which is a great time-saver if you really know what you're doing.

The key commands or hot keys can be assigned to any Recent or Favourite item, and all the usual modifier keys can be used. The hot key will then be available in the Open and Save dialog boxes in any program.

Other enhancements include the ability to add key commands for any item in ACTION Files' menus, plus overall enhancements like faster redrawing of window contents when using non-generic icons.

A few glitches still remain, such as redraw problems with applications that still use the old-style drop-down menus for file type selection, and you can't multiple-select files, although this is a limitation of the Mac toolbox and not ACTION Files itself.

Although Apple is introducing a new Navigation Services toolbox with Mac OS 8.5 which will greatly extend the Open/ Save dialog box's functionality, it still won't have anything near the level of power of ACTION Files. What's more, the program is guaranteed to work with Mac OS 8.5. The ultimate test of any utility is 'Could I use my Mac without it?', and I simply couldn't contemplate using mine without ACTION Files.