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Default Folder X? NOT WORTHY
Authored by: a little peaved! on Jan 08, '03 12:09:50PM

It's time to stop praising mediocre and inferior Macintosh software.

Does anyone remember Now Utilities?

It was great software that provided an entire suite of utilities. The Now Menus portion always provided far, far more functionality than Default Folder ever did. Default Folder was always greatly inferior in capabilities.

Unfortunately, Now Utilities went away. It was great on Mac OS 8, and became unreliable on OS 9. The reason for lack of support? The programmers behind Now Software were raided via company acquisition, and the software was laid to rest. Although PowerOn Software later regained the software, it DOES NOT have the same programmers behind their products.


Default Folder is a very weak subset of the functionality that the old Now Utilities suite provided. In fact, it was a very weak subset of the subset of Now Utilities that was called Now Menus.

Default Folder has always been overrated, because it started life as a cheap alternative for those folks that thought $50 or whatever was too much money to pay for Now Utilities.


Default Folder X 1.64 also has these bugs that I experienced:

1. On Mac OS X 10.1.5, "recent folders" were never remembered correctly. After just saving to a folder, the folder would most likely NOT be included as a recent folder. Remembering recent folders was very sporadic, at best. Perhaps this was a Mac OS X issue instead of Default Folder X bug.

2. On Mac OS X 10.2.3, rebounding does not work reliably. On occasion, it occurs properly. Almost all of the time, saving defaults to the top location on my computer.

3. Despite the setting to remember 50 items, far fewer is the maximum.

4. It is not possible to organize the menu of recent items. Now Menus allowed sorting by chronological or alphabetical order. A list of many items is a pain to navigate when there is no reliable ordering. Alphabetical is most desired.


My apologies if any of the above problems are due to user error or causes outside of the realm of Default Folder X.

Nevertheless, the weak, limited feature set is a poor, poor substitute for times when far better software was readily available for the Macintosh.

Now, due to lack of competition, Default Folder X costs as much as Now Utilities used to be available for during promotional pricing and special offers.

This situation is a sorry state for Macintosh computing.

It is very unwise, in my opinion, to praise, promote and support subpar solutions for our favorite platform.

The demise of Now Utilities and the ascendance of Default Folder X is a good illustration of the kind of mediocrity that Macintosh users are now accepting.




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Default Folder X? NOT WORTHY
Authored by: a little peaved! on Jan 08, '03 01:17:18PM

another bug:

When saving, navigating by clicking on a recent folder in Default Folder's menu does not work!

It takes TWO attempts before it actually does work.



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Default Folder X? NOT WORTHY
Authored by: jmignault on Jan 10, '03 01:53:12PM
Default Folder is a very weak subset of the functionality that the old Now Utilities suite provided. In fact, it was a very weak subset of the subset of Now Utilities that was called Now Menus.

Actually, this was even pre-Now Utilities. This originally came from a utility called Super Boomerang which Now bought and integrated into Now Utilities, which in its day was a great package. As I was reading the Default Folder review, I was thinking "This sounds an awful LOT like Super Boomerang." Boomerang first appeared in the System 7 days as I recall and regularly appeared on "top utilities" lists as indispensable. And it was.

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