If you have spent time in software development, you will know that Apple has become increasingly difficult and limited to customization over the past several decades. This has forced many to move over to Linux and other platforms. However, Apple has such a market share that those that want the functionality of macOS stick around and simply deal with the issues.

Over the last two decades, Cocoatech and several other independent development teams have quietly created solutions to these workflow problems and created stand-alone apps for certain workflow conundrums. Many times, this work is done in a vacuum and as a result, there are many solutions to the same problems. In rare cases, developers look around and seek solutions from their contemporaries. This is one of those rare cases! Cocoatech is excited to announce their collaboration with St. Clair Software’s Default Folder X (DFX) to create more customization to the macOS to help the end-users where Apple has fallen short.

Navigating Apple’s Road Blocks

Over the years, app developers have been forced to drop everything because Apple announces a new update that will effectively render their application useless unless they redesign it with the new Apple specs. This often takes hundreds of development hours just to integrate the updates. However, some applications like Cocoatech’s Path Finder have to lobby for the ability to even present their product to macOS users through the App store because they are attempting to improve upon the functionality.

To date, neither Path Finder, nor Default Folder X can be found in the Apple App store because they violate the terms of use as it improves upon macOS applications and allows customizations Apple simply will not. Improving functionality for the user means that it “hacks” some of the controls that Apple has put in place. A no no in Apple’s book. 

Cocoatech & St Clair Software Join Forces

Our developers got together to synchronize our code so they work together seamlessly to do things that macOS can not. It is a lofty goal to work on a smaller level with local developers to try and make macOS more user-friendly outside the confines of the support of Apple but Path Finder does not plan to stop with just one collaboration. We are seeking to work with other app developers who are not allowed in the app store to work together and improve the experience and functionality of the end-user.

In August of last year, the makers of Fortnite sued Apple and Google for allegedly monopolizing their app distribution stores and in-app payment processing markets after the tech giants for booting their game from the App store. They are still in litigation over this but it brought to light how Apple’s method of doing business does not allow for any deviance from what they have planned for their shareholder, no matter the cost to the end-user. 

A Call for Collaboration

Cocoatech and St Clair Software is the first of many collaborations. Cocoatech has no interest in suing Apple for not allowing it in the Apple app store so they will simply create code that makes their fellow techies more productive outside the usual channels.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

– Margaret Mead

In a world that seems divided on just about every issue these days, let’s find ways to work together. If you are a developer or have a favorite app that you would love to have functionality inside Path Finder reach out to us.

Contact our team at Cocoatech at sales@cocoatech.com

Hey flathub… Steve Gehrman here

Hello Path Finder fans! As 2020 comes to an end, it’s once again time for a brand new feature-filled update to Path Finder! 2020 has been one crazy year, but it hasn’t been all bad. 2020 was also the year of Path Finder 9! Path Finder 9 was a great release. It was one of our best. People from all over the world told us how they loved it, and how they relied on it throughout the pandemic to stay productive on their Macs. Despite the pandemic, Path Finder 9 worked tirelessly on thousands of computers all over the world. It managed your files, it popped open it’s dual pane awesomeness, it let you move your modules where ever you wanted, all without a single complaint. We thank you Path Finder 9 for all your hard work and to show our appreciation, today we are announcing your replacement, Path Finder 10!

INTRODUCING PATH FINDER 10

Path Finder 10 is chock full of Mac goodness. You asked for AirDrop support. It’s got AirDrop support. You wanted that cool new Sharing feature all the cool kids are using. Yeah, it’s got that too. You just bought a kick ass Apple Silicon Mac? No problem, Path Finder 10 is optimized to run native on Apple Silicon. You just updated to Big Sur? No problem, we redesigned Path Finder 10 to look amazing on Big Sur. You want to browse files on your iPhone? Path Finder now lets you browse files on your iOS devices. And as always, all the code has been reviewed, updated, polished and complied on the latest version of XCode. We don’t sell stale bits here, this app is fresh and hot off the press.

LICENSE SYSTEM

A quick remind on how our license system works. If you bought Path Finder 9 less than a year ago, you will be able to use that same license key on Path Finder 10 for a full year from your purchase date. After that, you will be prompted to buy Path Finder 10.

If you purchased Path Finder 9 within the last two months, the purchase system will offer you a free Path Finder 10 license. Fill out the form and we’ll manually email you a new license.

NEW FEATURES IN PATH FINDER 10:

• Airdrop Integration! For devices discoverable by “Everyone”
• Share to AirDrop, Messages, Mail, Notes, etc.
• Fully redesigned for macOS Big Sur.
• Native support for Apple Silicon.
• Improved Dark Mode.
• File Browsing on and file operations on USB connected iOS devices.
• Improved Drop Stack
• Improved Batch Renamer
• Brand new Big Sur style icon
• Lots of miscellaneous fixes, tweaks and improvements all over the app.

THANK YOU!

Can you believe that Path Finder has been in active development since 2000? That’s a long time! The amount of blood sweat and tears poured over that code could fill many football stadiums. But it’s been worth it. We are so happy that you love our app!

We hope you love Path Finder 10!

– Cocoatech

Many of our customers ask questions about how they can reduce their RAM footprint while using Path Finder. So we thought we’d share some useful and easy to use tips with you on how to reduce RAM usage. 

But before diving into actual tips to try, let us explain some underlying information, which is valid for the macOS environment generally. 

Historically from the beginning, macOS was rather hungry on RAM usage, in comparison to other OSes. Mac developers were encouraged to use maximum of RAM available for best performance and visual experience. In exchange, the macOS offered internal solutions to all running applications to manage RAM efficiently. We describe them below.  

Path Finder running smoothly and quickly is our first priority. To do so it caches file names, icons, images and anything else it sees on your file system into the RAM, making its footprint to grow.  Without this RAM cache, every time you scrolled up or down, or switched folder Path Finder would have to reread that information from your computer which would be slow and cause stuttering.

The great thing about the RAM cache is it’s smart!  If your operating system or another application needs RAM, macOS will tell Path Finder to release some of its cache and RAM is immediately released. Another strategy of the central RAM management is to transfer the information, stored in RAM onto the hard drive temporarily, while more RAM is requested by another application – this is called Virtual Memory. The cache is one feature of macOS that makes it a great platform for writing applications!

While intensively in use, Path Finder does use lots of RAM, but it’s generally not a concern as that RAM is freed whenever needed. However, you can reduce the RAM usage, if you allow Path Finder to display less RAM hungry content. This is how you can do it:

1. Turn off syntax colorizing in preview of text-based files.

The most common reason for higher memory usage in Path Finder is syntax colorizing of text-based files in the “Preview” module. Syntax colorizer is based on JavaScript. In order to function properly, it requires the usage of JavaScript context, which is known for higher memory usage. If you preview several text files whose syntax are colorized with the programming source files, Path Finder memory usage may grow to a certain amount (approximately 1 GB) and then stop growing. However, it will go down very slowly afterward if you stop previewing text files.

The higher memory usage caused by JavaScript context should not be of any concern, as it does not impact the performance and responsiveness of Path Finder. However, if you are still concerned about higher memory usage, you can to turn off syntax colorizing in the “Preview” module. We will provide native syntax colorizer in one of the following updates to Path Finder, which will not use JavaScript and thus will not consume much memory.

2. Clean up your Desktop from unnecessary files!

Having a lot of Desktop icons can eat up RAM. Especially on modern Retina displays each icon is displayed at a very high resolution so that you have the best visual experience. All this eats up RAM resources. If you are not ready to clean up the Desktop mess right away – maybe you can consider just creating one big folder, named “Desktop mess” and transfer all your Desktop files inside. This way you will instantly free up a lot of RAM. Having a cleaned-up desktop is the most effective tip in this regard!

3. Set your default view to List or Column View

The most RAM intensive view is Icon View with preview of the icons turned on. Even if you scroll down, the already previewed icons, which are already scrolled out of your view, are still stored inside the RAM Cache for better performance. If you do choose Icon View as your default view, you might consider switching the preview of the icons off to reduce RAM footprint. To do so set Path Finder to Icon View, then go to View=>View Options (Cmd-J) and uncheck “Show icons preview”. 

 4. Set your starting directory to a folder, which is not too big or   crowded

By default, the starting directory, which is displayed by Path Finder browser is set to Home directory. This is already better RAM-wise in comparison to, say, Computer root directory, which has more folders inside. If your home directory has a lot of folders as well, you might think of setting the Starting directory for example to (cleaned up!) Desktop, or another frequently used folder, which is not too crowded. You may do so by going to Preferences=>Browser=>Starting directory

5. Set your default browser view to minimum modules possible

Especially modules containing files or icon previews, including Cover Flow and Image Browser are quite RAM hungry. If you need to use this set of modules at a regular basis, you might consider saving them as one of your browser options via File=>New Browser=>Save Browser and open it on the occasions that you really need. Making a default browser contain a lot of image-related modules, especially if opened in several windows might eat up a lot of (unnecessary) RAM.  

6. Free up hard drive space 

Make sure approx. 20% of your hard drive stays free. This hard drive space is needed for the macOS Virtual Memory manager to be able to transfer the information, stored in RAM onto the hard drive temporarily, while more RAM is requested by another application. This process will go unnoticed if your hard drive has this extra space and is not filled out. To search for unnecessary files, which may slow down your computer performance, you might use Size Browser in Path Finder. Click on the toolbar button below:

A size browser window appears and you may trash or examine files, sorted by size:

After this clean up, you will surely notice the overall increase in performance on your computer, so it is a general tip to speed up things!

 7. Please contact us if you notice an unusual behavior such as:

• Path Finder was running in the background and not really used, but the RAM usage keeps increasing, without even using the application
• You are not using any visually intensive modules or views, your hard drive is not full and you applied the tips above and the RAM usage is still unusually high
• You experience performance hog on your entire machine while using Path Finder

All those cases are not normal – it means you found a bug or a memory leak. It would help a lot if you can tell us if you can reproduce it, so that we can track the problem down. Until now the reports of such cases were quite rare. 

We would love to hear your feedback about the article. If you have any questions, suggestions or remarks, please fill free to contact us at help@cocoatech.com

Since 2000, Path Finder has been in continual development and we have released a steady flow of free and paid updates. We have been releasing paid upgrades about once every 2-4 years and have released lots of free updates every few weeks. This upgrade cycle was much longer than what most companies use, but we usually found ourselves running way behind schedule, and we wanted to blow people away with a large number of new and exciting features.

We’ve realized that this release cycle isn’t the best for us, or our users. We always ran into the problem of having features ready, but we had to wait until the next major update to get them into the hands of our users. These large releases also took too much time to test and debug. And new releases sometimes had some minor issues the first few weeks after release.

ANNOUNCING A NEW RELEASE CYCLE

The reasons for the change is to get new features out to users as soon as possible. We no longer will hoard new features to be released in a later paid upgrade.

One solution is to use a software subscription, but most people myself included, dislike the idea of a subscription. I don’t want my credit card information stored on a remote server that could get hacked, and I don’t want to have to remember to cancel the subscription if I decide not to use the software in the future.

So we have designed a ‘best of both worlds‘ approach to selling Path Finder. We plan on releasing constant updates all year long, but we will have a paid upgrade once a year. The latest version will continue to get updates and the older versions will not unless a serious bug is found. This allows us to focus our energy on making the latest Path Finder rock solid on the latest versions of macOS. To be clear: this is not a subscription!

HERE’S HOW IT WORKS:

• Let’s say you purchased Path Finder 8. You can continue to use Path Finder 8 forever without paying. You bought it, you own it. This holds true for every version you pay for. You will always be able to run the version you paid for forever.
• Now we release Path Finder 9 for an upgrade fee. You can continue to use Path Finder 8, or you can pay to upgrade to Path Finder 9. New releases of Path Finder will happen every year.

The key feature of our new license system is that if you bought Path Finder 8 say 7 months ago, your Path Finder 8 license will still work for Path Finder 9 for 5 months. Basically you get a minimum of a year (12 months) since your purchase Path Finder to use the latest version.

After those 5 month are over, you will be prompted to upgrade to Path Finder 9 (or 10 if that’s the latest release).

So, we have solved the problem of a user buying Path Finder a few months before the next release of Path Finder. You can install and run Path Finder 9 at no cost until your full year has expired, or you can stay on Path Finder 8 and continue using that forever.

We also are going to offer free upgrades to people who have purchased in the last two months just to make sure no one feels like they made a mistake by buying so close to the latest release. The purchase system will automatically prompt you if you qualify.

We also setup our purchase system so that if you buy Path Finder 9, you can at any time revert back to Path Finder 8 and your Path Finder 9 license will work for all older versions too.

We hope this makes sense and we hope you agree that this is fair. This new license system will make it possible to continually delivering cutting edge features and new updates to Path Finder without much delay.

If you are upgrading a volume license, the new purchase system will allow that. Just update the number of users you need when upgrading and there will be a discount applied automatically.

NEW FEATURES IN PATH FINDER 9:

• Path Finder 9 brings back collapsible module shelves. There are four shelves, on each side of the browser window. But now, each shelf is fully customizable and can accommodate for arbitrary number of freely arranged and customized modules.
• Path Finder 9 also brings many significant improvements in the way the application performs and behaves. It improves compatibility with macOS 10.15 Catalina, fixes many potential crashes, memory and CPU consumption issues, UI and other bugs and annoyances.
• Numerous small features are added and existing one improved and redesigned.
• Overall, the application is more robust and stable, providing a solid foundation for further development and improvements.

– Cocoatech

Learn how to reveal and remove files or programs from your Mac with the help of Path Finder.

Hey Path Finder Community, 

One of the most useful tools in Path Finder 8.5 continues to be the Size Browser for those moments when this message appears:

You are reminded of that “free trial” of software you installed that ate up some of your storage or that movie you forgot you downloaded six months ago that has been dragging down your Mac’s performance silently ever since. In Path Finder 8.5, we added a Size Browser toolbar button to make it even easier to discover those huge and sometimes hidden files. 

Here is how to get started with Size Browser if you are new to it:

1. Choose the folder where you would like to start searching for unnecessary big files. You may start in your /Home folder, but you can simply choose /Macintosh HD or another volume to start scanning the whole drive.
2. Click on the Size Browser toolbar button. The Size Browser interface will appear.

    3. Path Finder is now scanning and calculating the sizes, wait until the spinning wheel at the right stops and all red numbers become black – this means that the calculation is complete. 

4. Browse the hierarchy – it will be sorted by size, largest to smallest. Some of the calculation might still continue, but you may already move files that you would like to the Trash immediately. If you are unsure and would like to review some files – choose “Reveal” and you will be able to open them from the main Path Finder window. 

5. Do not forget to close the Size Browser window after you are done! The size calculation procedure is CPU intensive and live, so the window staying open without purpose might continue to eat some resources without you being aware of it.  

How to delete files and apps on Mac that won’t delete:

Occasionally you might meet some “hard-necking” apps or large folders that will not delete from your Mac. This is not without a reason – most of the time they are protected by the system so that you will not delete something you did not realize you need for other functions. Given that the Path Finder audience is usually very suffocated we still want to urge a “do not try this at home” warning if you are not sure about how the actions will affect the overall performance of your Mac. If you feel confident, please proceed:

To delete undeletable files, you will have to authenticate as a superuser of your computer, known as “root” on UNIX systems (to which family macOS also belongs to). Normally you would need Terminal to do this. Path Finder will do this job for you – when you attempt to move or delete a system file a dialog box pops up where you will be prompted for an administrator password. The root password is usually identical to your system administrator password. Upon authentication, you will be able to move or delete this file from the system as a normal file by moving it into the Trash. 

To free even more space you can opt to remove some of the pre-installed standard software. There are many pre-installed programs on macOS. Some of them you use regularly, and some of them you do not open at all. Normally you would have to use Terminal and write commands to remove this software. However, in Path Finder, it becomes very easy without any complicated Terminal commands. 

1. Choose a pre-installed system program (e.g. Photo Booth) that you would like to remove and move it to Trash
2. You will be presented with the authentication dialog, mentioned above
3.  Click on “Authenticate” and enter your administrative (root) password. The file is in the Trash and you’re done!

If you would like to discover some other favorite features in Path Finder and find the dozens of ways to save your time and energy, download the full-featured 30-days Path Finder 8.5 trial here today on our home page: www.cocoatech.com/#

More than a year ago, we introduced Path Finder: Version 8. As you can read here, with that version, we started a long overdue process of overhauling the entire application. The PF 8 update added all the new features that were needed to bring Path Finder into modern days of ever-changing macOS. We continue that process with version 8.5. Even though it doesn’t bring the required amount of innovation and changes to justify a significant version bump, it still brings a lot of new fundamental things, which deserves a dedicated blog post. Moreover, since it is not a new major version, we released it for free to our community of over 100k users.

So what is the big news in this version? Continuing our pursuit for better performance, reliability, and modern code base, we replaced outdated StuffIt SDK with our own archiving engine based on system libraries and frameworks already built-in into the system. A huge change like this deserves a few lines of history.

“We were busy adding new features and capabilities, and we rarely gave any thought about archiving because it was already functioning very well. Our application overhaul process finally came to haunt us and ultimately expel StuffIt SDK this spring, with the introduction of our own archiving engine based on libarchive.”

At the time Path Finder gained the ability to archive/compress and expand/decompress archives, the most used program on macOS for such purposes was StuffIt Expander (used for expanding and bundled with OS installation) and StuffIt Deluxe (which could also handle archiving) from Smith Micro Software. Few others were coming from old MacOS 8/9 and ported to macOS using Carbon framework, but they were not widely used. Most importantly, there wasn’t any library or framework built into the system, which could handle those tasks. Besides offering above mentioned applications, Smith Micro also offered StuffIt SDK, a framework that could handle archiving/expanding task with most widely used archiving and compression formats at the time. Their SDK was a natural choice for Path Finder, which has been using it ever since version 2.0

Years were passing by and StuffIt application and SDK were becoming less and less used, as macOS was getting more and more capabilities and built-in libraries and frameworks expanding the number of tasks Path Finder could do without reaching for the help of 3rd party frameworks. Finally in 2009, macOS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) came with build in libarchive library. That made a huge positive turn regarding archiving and expanding tasks in macOS without reaching for external help. Almost ten years have passed since then, and Path Finder continued using StuffIt SDK for much longer than it was necessary. We were busy adding new features and capabilities, and we rarely gave any thought about archiving because it was already functioning very well. Our application overhaul process finally came to haunt us and ultimately expel StuffIt SDK this spring, with the introduction of our own archiving engine based on libarchive.

All this brings some incredible gains and depending on archive/compression format; the new engine offers up to 30% speed improvement when archiving and even more (in some cases up to 65%) when expanding files. Path Finder can now create ZIP, that is password protected, 7-ZIP, XAR, TAR, PAX and CPIO archives, compressed with various compression formats, such as GZIP, BZIP2, Compress, XZ. Expanding support now includes ZIP, 7-ZIP, XAR, TAR, PAX, CPIO, AR, LHA/LZH, RAR and CAB archives, with various decompression filters, including XZ, LZIP, and LZMA. Worth noting is that due to the new archiving engine, the application bundle size has been reduced from 53 MB to 38.5 MB! Additionally, we didn’t just replace the old archiving engine. We took the opportunity of introducing the new one to also integrate it much better into file operations workflow. Now, archiving and expanding operations are treated as any other file operation (copy/move/delete). This includes queueing, progress bar and finish time estimation, so it is as easy to learn and use them as the rest of Path Finder.

Version 8.5 brings some other improvements as well. Since we’ve already touched file operations, we took the opportunity to improve copy/move/delete engine as well. There are speed improvements across a wide range of different file copying scenario, and the most significant gains come when copying a bunch of files in folder hierarchies on SSD volumes formatted with APFS. In this particular case, file copying can be up to three times (3x) faster, but on average, you will see a 5 – 50% increase in file copying speed. File deletion has also gained some minor speed improvements. See it in action below:

Second to saving time, we wanted to save you space on your Mac in several ways. As mentioned, the application itself is 30% smaller, some new archiving and compression formats sport better compression ratio (like 7-ZIP and LHA/LZH/LZMA). Additionally, we wanted to make files that take up tons of space, easier to find. We have had the Size Browser as a tool for many years, but many people did not know about it and had a hard time finding it. So, we added a button to it right in the toolbar as a default.

Size Browser shows the list of files and folders inside a selected folder ordered by size so you can find the large ones you forgot about and delete or compress them.

One more thing we did to save you time is to add a new “undo” panel in case you mistakenly moved a file or performed any other undoable operation and want to undo it quickly. Again, undoing actions was always possible, but we just made it easier and more apparent. In case you don’t want to be reminded of undoable actions, uncheck “Show undo panel” in Path Finder preferences.

Finally, we want to rest assure you that we listen to users feedback. We are aware of issues, small bugs, and feature requests you send to us, and we take all of them seriously. We are continually working on them to improve Path Finder in general. We are also currently working on a comprehensive Path Finder Manual. If you have pro tips to share, please reach out to kimberly@cocoatech.com. We will happily credit your unique contributions. All those activities and difficulties that we are facing in implementation deserve a dedicated blog post, so look for our next blog post in a few weeks. To be sure not to miss it, please sign up for our e-newsletter on our home page and find us on Facebook & Twitter. We hope our loyal users recognize the efforts we consistently put in to make Path Finder the best file management experience for MacOS. Enjoy the Path Finder 8.5 update and keep your eyes peeled for partner offers and more news right around the corner! May you have many productive hours with PF 8.5 coming in your future.

Most Mac users may not know it, but Path Finder journey in the Mac universe is now been more than seventeen years! It is so long that we don’t even remember exactly when it began, but it was way before Macs (and Apple) were as popular as they are now. We are only sure that the very first release came out pretty much at the same time as the first official release of macOS (then called Mac OS X), so let’s assume it was April of 2001. If we don’t count applications made by developers proficient in Cocoa and working on NeXTStep before, we can proudly say that Path Finder was one of the first Cocoa applications made specifically for macOS. At that time, Path Finder was called SNAX. The major motivation for creating it was to offer some nice file manager features which Apple’s Finder lost in transition from the old MacOS (System 9) to Mac OS X. Like, for example, Trash can being located on the Desktop and not in, as most Mac users at the time thought, “some weird thing called Dock”.

SNAX 1: List view was the only option back in 2001.

Another nice feature people immediately liked was the Path Navigator (later transformed into both clickable and editable path bar). This popular feature led to a name change, hence Path Finder. The name was clearly telling people what the application did (and we also got tired of the old SNAX name as well). During all those years, Path Finder was becoming more powerful, functional, configurable and feature rich. People were asking for more and we were delivering more. We got ourselves into a constant drag race between features people wanted and those we could implement in a given time. And we were adding more and more… Until we couldn’t keep doing it that way any longer. In this constant race for more features, while becoming more powerful and rich, Path Finder was also becoming increasingly aged. With each major release of macOS, the application was getting more lines of obsolete code, deprecated APIs and officially unsupported features. The moment of imminent redesign and rewrite was getting closer. We tried to postpone it as much as we could in a passionate desire to offer yet a few new features, so we kept patching and finding workarounds for unsupported and obsolete stuff. But with the latest macOS updates we have finally come to the inevitable; going back to the drawing board and give Path Finder the proper overhaul it needed for a long time.

Path Finder 5: Drawers and CoverFlow, the very first 3rd party application having it, back in 2008.

Introducing version 8! It is our attempt to give Path Finder new shine, get it out of its adolescence and bring it into its twenties. However, Path Finder is too large and complex to bring it there in just one step. We couldn’t just start redesigning and rewriting everything from scratch. That would take us many years considering application size and resources we have and we probably wouldn’t survive that long. Not to mention many loyal users would probably abandon the application, getting tired and frustrated over everlasting wait for the new version. We also couldn’t appear with completely redesigned and new application, which would lack many of its previous features people become so fond of. No, we aren’t Apple (think first release of Final Cut Pro X and all the rage it caused in usually firmly loyal user community), we wouldn’t survive that either. We needed to still offer some new nice features in order to attract loyal users to upgrade and new ones to purchase. Hence, Path Finder 8 is the right balance (we believe) between new and old.

The big new thing in version 8 is modules and the way they are organized and used. All other news in this version revolves or are somehow related to modules. As you probably know, modules aren’t anything new to Path Finder. The old version had bottom and right shelves (plus the sidebar), each of them could accommodate four modules. Even older versions had modules in window drawers. Still, those modules were pretty much static and fixed to a place. Not in Path Finder 8! It sports a completely new and flexible modules structure. You can put as many modules in a single browser window (or “Get info” window/inspector) as you need. You can arbitrarily arrange them anywhere around browsing view of your single or dual pane. You can dismiss or drag them away when you don’t need them any longer. You can drag them from one window to the other choosing to move or copy a module. You can assign each module to either left pane, right pane, or both. You can choose from more than twenty different module types. Finally, you can extensively customize every module with a lot of visual and functional settings. This flexibility and configurability gives you endless possibilities to organize your windows and working space. With the new module structure, Path Finder probably becomes the most configurable and flexible Mac application on the market.

Path Finder 8: Modules (over)load, now in 2018.

Everything about modules is new inside and out. They look new, but they also work in a new way, using completely rewritten redesigned and modernized code. We started the above-mentioned Path Finder overhaul with them. But they aren’t the only new thing. A lot of things around modules had to be changed and redesigned to allow them to fit in into the old code structure. It will not be visible to users, but a lot of things are changed and made better, faster and more robust. The code was made modern and more modular, so future news and changes will fit much easier and they should not take such a long time, as modules have. The part where new things interconnect with old was the most challenging part of the overhaul. And the overhaul is far from being over. With new modules and all redesign around them, we estimate around 40% (yes, only 40%) of the code is new. There is still a long way to go before Path Finder becomes fully adult. Some old glitches are still in there. Some new ones (hopefully not many) will probably show their ugly heads. But the first and most challenging steps are done. With the good foundation laid out, further changes and improvements should be easier, faster and delivered more often.

We hope our loyal users recognize the effort we put to bring Path Finder into the modern era and still keep it the most complete file manager for Mac. We hope we will attract new users with many new (and old) features, which gives Path Finder the edge over Finder and other file managers. We can assure both groups that there is a strong will and commitment to make Path Finder better in every way possible for a long time. At least as long as this previous years. This exciting journey started more than seventeen years ago and we hope at least another seventeen are in front of us. We wish you all a lot of enjoyable and productive hours with Path Finder.

A Small Team In a Big World

Cocoatech was founded in San Francisco in 2001. We have grown up alongside Apple helping entrepreneurs, small to large companies, and creative professionals to make order of chaos. Our team reaches from the US to Europe but our clients are all over the world. We are really excited to share our creation Path Finder with you. May you have many happy and productive hours ahead with Path Finder on your team.

Our Founder Steve Gehrman, started Cocoatech like so many others in the Silicon Valley, in his home and out of necessity. The only exception was he started it in LA before moving up to SF where he currently resides. He needed a tool to support him while he developed programs but it didn’t exist, so he created it. That was 18 years ago at the time this was written and now Path Finder is installed all over the world. Many have imitated it but none have the depth of tools and development that Path Finder offers.

Visit our home page and download the current version today for free for 30 days and join our newsletter to be up to date on all our current offers and partner deals.

– Cocoatech team