Release notes 1.8.0

1.8 brings better insight into your file system, with lots of added metadata and aggregated sizes for folders.

IMPORTANT: Unfortunately, older Windows versions will not auto-update to 1.8 due to a change in the signing certificate. Therefore, registered users will need to download and install this update manually.

New Features

Total directory sizes

The total size of a directory’s contents can now be conveniently calculated. Just hover over the Size column of a folder (or a Mac package), and click the icon that appears. Alternatively use the Calculate Directory Size menu entry.

A calculated size will display a tooltip on hover, showing the total number of files and folders within.

If the size of some of the contained files couldn’t be read for whatever reason, the total size will have an approximation sign in front of it, indicating that it can’t quite be fully trusted.

Since this can be a relatively time-consuming operation for large folders, results are cached. The older they get though, the more faded they will look, to remind you that the size might be out of date and needing a refresh.

Additional file properties and metadata

The data columns available for each pane were always a bit on the minimal side in Fileside. Now a few more have been added, showing things like attributes and flags, owners and groups, file type descriptions, as well as several timestamps other than just the last modified date.

Worth noting is that enabling more columns can mean slower folder listings. This is especially noticeable on Windows when Description, Owner and Group columns are enabled for slower drives like network shares. Disabling those three columns will vastly speed up retrieval time.

On Windows, there’s also a new Network Path column in This PC.

Preserve dates when copying

There’s now an option under Settings to preserve the last modified date when copying files. Previously Fileside would always consider a copy a new file, and assign the last modified date to the time of creating the copy.

Copy & paste images

Right-click an image in a browser or elsewhere, choose Copy Image, and paste it directly into a Fileside as a file. Works the other way too, from previews within Fileside.

Mac: Show package contents

Mac packages like apps and bundles can now be stepped into right within Fileside, by right-clicking and choosing Show Package Contents.

Improvements

• Open With works for folders too.
• Cursor position is preserved after deleting a file.
• Context menus available in text inputs and other controls too.
• Layout button initials are now generated from TitleCased, hyphen-separated, underscore_separated names and more, in addition to just space-separated words.
• Keyboard shortcuts prevented from potentially triggering an additional action if their modifier key is released before the main key.
• Double clicks on archives are no longer hijacked, allowing them to be opened in an external app. Use the Extract action explicitly to extract archives within Fileside.
• File selection is saved with layouts.
• The number of selected files (and their total size) are shown also for the search results view.
• Windows: Names of mapped drives to folders show leaf folder name instead of just the volume name under This PC.
• Windows: New menu bar implementation fixing a number of smaller glitches.

Bug fixes

• Make sure app window does not get stranded on a disconnected monitor on startup.
• Windows: Previewing PDFs with special characters like # in the name fixed.
• Mac: Fixed some hidden files not showing as faded.
• Mac: Fixed crash when opening Open With > Other… picker in two panes simultaneously.

Breaking changes

MacOS 10.13 and 10.14 no longer supported

MacOS 10.15 Catalina is now the minimum requirement.

Unfortunately, licensed builds of version 1.7.2 will automatically try to update to 1.8.0 even on Macs running older versions than Catalina. If you’re running into this problem and want to keep running Fileside 1.7.2 on an older Mac, please contact us for a workaround.