¨
What's New
What's a major new release of File Buddy without new features? A partial list (we're adding to this list with each release) of enhancements includes (items marked with ‡ are new or changed in the release accompanying this document):

✓ Authorize File Buddy 8's new Administrator Mode to gain unlimited access to all items in your 
Mac OS X file system and modify owner and permissions.
✓ Customizable Toolbars in the List and Info windows feature new buttons, new functionality, and
easier access to existing features. These replace the small, fixed toolbars which used to live at the
top of these windows. The List and Info window toolbars contain new buttons to let you add items to
list windows, e-mail the current item, and more.
✓ The redesigned, resizable Info window offers a cleaner appearance and greater efficiency.
✓ The List window has been redesigned to offer a cleaner look and easier access to more features.
✓ File Buddy 8 provides more options for renaming files, including names with alphanumeric 
sequences (Rename Sequentially), as well as names containing the file's creation or modified 
date (Rename with Dates).
✓ The QuickView™ submenu of the Cleaning menu contains items for instantly displaying several 
standard folders in a List window. Want to quickly see all the fonts in Mac OS X's multiple Fonts 
folders? Just choose Fonts from the QuickView menu and you'll get a List window listing all of your 
Fonts folders. Cache and Preferences folders? No problem. The QuickView menu contains a total of 
eight kinds of folders you can view instantly.
✓ File Buddy 8 has Viewers™! If we sound excited, it's because we are. Viewers are cool. Viewers are  
windows you can open from the Info and List windows which display the contents of a variety of file 
types (primarily graphic files and files containing text in this beta release). Viewers are great for 
going through a list of files you want to clean out since a Viewer is automatically updated and even 
resized to display the contents of the currently selected file.
✓ QuickNotes™ provide simple feedback and then close automatically to get out of your way.
✓ Easier access to File Buddy features via the new contextual menu plug-in, which offers several 
additional commands.
✓ Live scrolling is now supported everywhere.
✓ There's a new preference for people who don't use Finder comments to ignore them when copying 
and moving files to improve performance during those operations.
✓ And there's more. (We'll have a complete list soon!) Download your copy and try it today!

Other Changes

✓ Improved Panther compatibility. Panther brought a lot of changes with it, for both users and 
developers. We were aware of a number of minor issues when using File Buddy 7 with Panther, but 
work on File Buddy 8 was well under way before Panther was even released. Rather than devote 
resources to improving File Buddy 7's Panther compatibility, we chose to continue focusing our 
complete energies (other than fixing bugs in File Buddy 7) on File Buddy 8.
✓ File Buddy no longer quits automatically when launched by dropping items on it. With Mac OS X's 
memory management system and changes to File Buddy to reduce its use of the processor when it 
isn't actually doing anything, it makes more sense to leave File Buddy running even when you aren't 
actively using it.
✓File Buddy now displays an informative warning message prior to erasing unused disk space. Due to 
some problems in the way Mac OS X virtual memory system handles low disk space situations, 
filling the disk with erasure files can cause problems if you're actively using applications while File 
Buddy is erasing unused space. The message explains that it's best to erase unused disk space 
immediately after a restart, and to leave your Mac alone until the process is complete. This is 
especially true if you're erasing the unused space on the startup volume.
✓ Sometimes people need to reenter their serial numbers, and we've added a simple way to do that in 
File Buddy 8. When you enter your serial number, File Buddy creates the folder File Buddy Extras 
inside your user Documents folder (~/Documents/File Buddy Extras). Inside the Extras folder is the 
File Buddy 8 Registration folder containing two items:
    Registration Info.txt - This file contains your complete registration information.
    File Buddy.fbAutoReg - A special automatic registration file.
Double-click the automatic registration file to reenter your registration information should the 
need ever arise. No dialogs, no retyping serial numbers, no muss, no fuss. Note that the .fbAutoReg 
file will only work if File Buddy is running on the same Mac on which it was installed when you 
entered your serial number the first time.
(*In b1-b4, the File Buddy Extras folder was created in ~/Library instead of ~/Documents, so if you used an
earlier beta release to enter your serial number, look for the File Buddy Extras folder in that location.)
✓ The new contextual menu plug-in has more commands for providing quick access to File Buddy
features for Finder selections.
✓ Check for Newer Version now uses a server accessed via your Internet connection to determine if you're using the latest version. (No personal information or information about anything on your computer other than the version of File Buddy which is running is sent to the server.)

Menus

✓ Menus have been streamlined and reorganized to make them more intuitive and efficient.
✓ A new E-mail Us item has been added to the Help menu.
✓ All commands which only make sense while running File Buddy in demonstration mode have been 
moved to the new File Buddy > Trial menu.
✓ Commands which were in File Buddy 7's Web menu now live in the Help menu. The Empty Trash
and Quit Finder commands have been moved to the Cleaning menu and the Special menu has been
removed.

Info Window Enhancements

✓ The new fully-configurable toolbar includes buttons previously included in File Buddy's Info window, 
in addition to several useful new buttons, including E-mail, View in List, Delete and more. Several 
existing buttons have also been enhanced with new menus containing additional commands.
✓ The enhanced Icon Well now displays larger, 64x64-pixel icons.
✓ Double-click the Icon Well to open a File Viewer.
✓ Double-click a folder's icon to open a new List window containing that folder's contents.
✓ A new Export Icon to File command in the bevel button menu next to the Icon Well saves the current
item's icon as a Mac OS X ".icns" file, viewable in Apple Preview or in a File Buddy Viewer.
✓ A new Apply button saves the current changes without closing the window or advancing to the next 
item.
✓ Finder flags which are obsolete as of Mac OS X 10.3 have been removed.
✓ Use the new Label display to change labels with a single click.
✓ The Info Window can now be resized horizontally for easier viewing of long filenames, more space 
for editing comments, and access to all toolbar items when the toolbar is fully populated.
✓ Command-Delete now moves the current item to the Trash.
✓ The pop-up menu next to the Type field now contains a list of valid file types for the item’s Creator 
signature, in addition to the favorite types added by previous use.
✓ A new preference to notify you if File Buddy encounters improper values in an application's property
list. This would mostly appeal to developers and users who like to report such problems to
developers.
✓ New items have been added to the Clipboard menu to facilitate copying more kinds of information to
the Clipboard.
✓ A new Adjust command in the Created and Modified date menus lets you adjust each date by adding or subtracting a fixed amount of time.

Info Droplets

✓ File Buddy 8 Droplets use a single window to display a description of what they do and provide
options for configuring them.
✓ Dragging files and folders into the Scheduled Actions area of a Droplet window is the same as 
dropping those items on the Droplet in Finder.
✓ Dragging a single item into the Options area of a Droplet configures the Droplet to operate on the same kind of items.
✓ File Buddy 8 Droplets pass dropped items to File Buddy for processing, which offers significant 
advantages over the way Droplets worked in previous versions of File Buddy.

Find Window Enhancements

✓ Two new commands in the Find menu and a change in the Find window's preferences let you 
establish a default configuration which can be used whenever the window is opened or loaded via a 
keystroke.

List Window Enhancements

✓ There's a new Icon Well for displaying the icon of a selected item. Double-click a file's icon in the 
Icon Well to open a File Viewer. Double-click a folder's icon to open a new List window containing 
that folder's contents.
✓ There's a new Default Button you can use to take action on the current selection by pressing the 
Return and Enter keys. To choose the action the button should invoke, Control-click the button or
using the List > Default Button Action menu.
✓ The status bar at the bottom of the window uses the entire width of the window to display the path 
when a single item is selected.
✓ When a single item is selected in the list, clicking the status bar opens a path menu which can take 
you to any folder in the path to the item.
✓ Control-click the status bar to open a menu with commands to copy paths to the Clipboard if one or 
more items are selected in the list.
✓ The new Add Contents toolbar button lets you quickly add the contents of any folder in its menu. The 
Add Contents menu is initially populated with Desktop, Documents, Home, Pictures, Movies, and 
Music. You can add additional folders with the menu's Add Contents to List command.
✓ Reverse the current sort order by clicking the currently sorted column's header.
✓ There's a new option for Large Rows in the Prefs toolbar item menu. Large rows are twice as tall as 
normal rows to provide space for 32-pixel icons and two lines of information in some columns.

File Renaming 

Pattern-based Renaming
✓ The Rename window now has options for adding text at the beginning and the end of the new 
name. The options to shorten names and use an ellipsis in shortened names were removed 
because File Buddy 8 is only for use in Mac OS X, where file names can contain up to 255 
characters.
‡ Renaming Droplets can be created from the Rename window.

Sequential File Renaming
✓ The following options have been added for prefixing and appending a variety of data to the 
sequence part of the name: User-specified text, the original name of the file, the original name + 
text, the parent folder's name, and text + the parent folder's name.
✓ Sequences can now be alphanumeric, and "carries" are handled intelligently. For example, "02a" 
would follow "01z", whereas "0ba" would follow "0az".
✓ Files are now sorted by name before renaming unless renaming items in an Info or List window.

Rename with Dates
✓ This is a brand new rename option for File Buddy 8, and it lets you rename files with names 
containing their creation or modified dates. Instead of a folder full of pictures from your day at the 
beach with names like DSCN0001.JPG, DSCN0002.JPG, and so on, give them names like "At the 
beach on 8/24/03 at 1:23 PM".
‡ Droplets can be created from the Rename with Dates window.

✓ There is a new progress window for files being renamed which gives you the option to view and edit each name before it is applied.
✓ Press the Option key when clicking the Rename button in any of the rename windows to initiate the renaming process immediately. The default behavior is to open a renaming progress window and wait for your action.
✓ All file renaming windows have been designed/redesigned to make them more consistent for easier 
use.

Duplicate Files

✓ Duplicate file searches can now use any of three name-based options: the full name, extension, and 
now just the name, ignoring extensions.
✓ The resulting list of duplicate files now use colors in alternate groups of duplicates to make it easier 
to see which files are duplicates of each other.
✓ New options have been added to Find Duplicate/Unique Files windows to ignore invisible items and 
files inside packages.
✓ The Find Duplicate/Unique Files windows now have an option to create Droplets! Drag files and 
folders to one of these droplets to scan them for duplicate or unique files using the criteria set in the 
window at the time the droplet was created.

Alias Checking

✓ The Broken Aliases window has been redesigned for improved usability.

Note: This document describes some of the changes which were in place at the time it was written, but is not yet 
complete. All features are subject to change, enhancement, or even removal at any time.

¨

SkyTag Software, Inc.