Product Reviews

MAC OS X has brought major benefits to the Mac platform, many of them lifted lock, stock and barrel from the NeXTSTEP operating system. However, a few things didn't quite make it through unscathed, one of them being NeXT's superb File Browser, which has mutated into the Finder columns view. Luckily, for those who do and those who don't know what they're missing, there's Path Finder, which supplements OS X's Finder windows with pure interface joy.

Path Finder's features and improvements are too numerous to list individually. Let's just say it is the Finder for grown-ups. Where to start? It doesn't completely replace the Finder - this still runs alongside Path Finder - but it provides an alternative way of looking into your file system and organising and managing your files and folders.

Because it's written entirely in Cocoa and is highly multi-threaded, multiple simultaneous copies are handled with aplomb, and copying a folder of half a million files barely makes Path Finder break into a sweat. However, Cocoa applications can make some older Macs struggle, and we noticed that PF was a little unresponsive on a 500MHz iBook.

There's also good news for Mac OS 9 diehards. Path Finder allows you to implement user-configurable 'striping' in list and column views to aid readability, and it also implements the old Disclosure Triangles, allowing folders to cascade open in the same column. It goes without saying that Spring-loaded folders are supported, as are Labels and an Application Switcher

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menu. You can also choose to have Trash on your Desktop.

But it's more than just an OS 9 emulation. Bring up a Contextual menu for a file or folder and you'll find invaluable Copy to... and Move to... commands as well as Open with..., Compress, and Secure Delete, which writes strings of 1s and 0s over your data, making sure it really is deleted, although obviously, this will take a lot more time than just trashing the file.

On the right Path

Path Finder also implements two great NeXTSTEP features: one is a dedicated Preview that sits in a tray at the side of the browser, not in another column like OS X's Finder. This avoids the OS X problem of the file you want to launch suddenly jumping one column to the left, leaving the preview under your mouse. The preview window also gives a lot more information than the standard OS X offering.

The other neat feature available here is the Path Navigator. This sits between the browser window and the Toolbar, and represents linearly the path taken through the file system to the present point. Jumping backwards and forwards is simply a matter of hitting the appropriate point on the Path Navigator. NeXT users will recognise this as an implementation of the Crumb Trail, although Path Finder's version isn't as nice looking.

One thing that is missing, however, is an implementation of the NeXT Move/Copy shelf, although Path Finder's author, Steve Gehrman, has promised to include one in a future release.

There's also a command to open any item as Root (the Unix 'Superuser'), so you can have two copies of Path Finder sitting side-by-side on your desktop, one with your normal user privileges, and the other with root privileges - both right from inside your own account.

If there are any drawbacks with the product at present, other than the slower performance on older Macs, it's probably the Find file interface, which only allows you to search for strings of characters, and which takes over the entire browser interface to display its results. Other than that, Path Finder is great - and it can only get better.