Marc Edwards:
What’s new? Everything. iStat Menus 7 is a full reboot, sporting an all-new design with hundreds of big and small improvements.
Bjango (version history):
New menu bar modes, including stacked labels and values. New menu bar items, like Wi-Fi name, and GPU frames per second. Frequency monitoring and additional sensors on Apple Silicon Macs. More theme options and menu background colors. Fan speeds can now ramp up gradually with complete control over the speed curve.
The time menu has 7-day and 14-day rolling calendar modes. Combined mode has been drastically overhauled, and can now display any item in the menu bar, with unique settings, and has more available menu sections in the dropdown menu.
I like the new design, the additional configurability, and the extra information that it shows, e.g. for disk and processor usage. (It appears that my Mac is almost constantly using both efficiency cores.) It’s a bargain at $11.99 or $9.99 to upgrade. It’s also on Setapp.
I hope that a future version will add support for recording process samples directly from the menu, as that would free me from having to leave an Activity Monitor window open at all times to quickly see what code is running when something weird happens.
See also:
Previously:
This is kinda cool. The new
@bjango
iStat Menus v7 can show a flag where your VPN is connected to.
Activity Monitor Developer Tool iStat Menus Mac Mac App macOS 14 Sonoma
Matt Sephton:
Many years ago I found ContextMenu ($4.99) which solves all of the issues I have with the Automator approach [to adding file commands to Finder’s contextual menu]. There’s also a free version, ContextMenu Lite, that supports up to 3 actions to give you a taste of the good stuff.
- Submenu is optional
- Apply to multiple types (files or directories; can be as granular as file extension)
- Show output (sometimes you want to see the results of the command)
- Confirmation before running (if it’s a potentially dangerous operation)
[…]
Here’s my repo of shared actions. Inside each .cmaction file is a main.sh file which contains the command that you can use in Automator if you’d like.
Previously:
Automator Finder Mac Mac App macOS 14 Sonoma
ZigZag:
Still, no matter how often I use an alternate file manager and constantly tracking progress of development of most of them, I still find myself manipulating files in Finder very often. Finder is just convenient. It’s always there, ready to be put into action. There are also some things, for which Finder is practically a must, since alternative file managers cannot do them due to lack of Apple support (private APIs, undocumented features changing unannounced, even with minor OS updates). Working with files in iCloud Drive and using Time Machine are some of those things, which come to mind. If only Finder could do just a few additional and more advanced things, like proper and full POSIX permission setting, or Access Control List (ACL), maybe showing a checksum of the selected file…
That’s where FileUtils comes from. About a decade ago, Apple came up with official way and API to extend Finder functionality, in a way that developers could add additional actions performed on files selected in Finder, invoked with additional, custom contextual menu items (actually, adding contextual menu items was possible a long time ago, before macOS 10.6 Snow Leopard, but it required tons of Carbon code and was eventually deprecated when going 64-bits). FileUtils does exactly that. While the application is running, you will notice some additional menu items in Finder’s contextual menu (and dedicated FileUtils toolbar item menu too). Each additional item invokes a particular action on files selected in Finder, action Finder cannot do on its own.
I love this idea. The initial features include checksumming, compression, secure delete, permissions and ACLs, renaming, and file sizes (in columns, like OmniDiskSweeper). The current version has worked well for me except that it sometimes crashes when viewing a folder that contains a large number of archives. I’m hoping that a future version will add some more developer oriented features, like getting Mach-O and code signing information.
There are separate non-sandboxed ($9.95), sandboxed, and Mac App Store ($9.99) versions, with the former providing more direct access to files, as well as privileged file operations.
Previously:
Extensions File Ownership File Permissions FileUtils Finder Mac Mac App Mac App Store macOS 14 Sonoma OmniDiskSweeper Sandboxing System Services
Kaleidoscope 4.5 (tweet):
Recently, we have spent a lot of time on many aspects of the folder comparison feature for Kaleidoscope 4.4 and 4.5. We have overhauled some of the underpinnings and worked hard to improve reliability and speed. But we also added some major new features. It’s time to tell you a bit what they are and how you can benefit from those changes.
[…]
Now you can expand any folder, synchronously in A and B, without the need to open a new document. In addition, upon completion of the difference calculation, Kaleidoscope will automatically expand folders with changes in them and leave all the others collapsed. This means you’ll get an overview of all changes with no additional interaction required.
[…]
As you are making changes to folders you are comparing, Kaleidoscope will dynamically and quickly update the comparison, on any level.
[…]
When Date Modified or Size for an item is the same between A and B, a regular font is used. If there is a difference, the font style is bolder. In addition, the side with the more recent date or the bigger size is shown in blue, providing you with information at a glance.
I’ve been really impressed with the pace of improvements since they switched to the subscription model about a year ago.
Kaleidoscope 5 (Mastodon, tweet):
While we had started to integrate Git over the last few releases, Kaleidoscope 5 is reaching a new level, enabling you to dig into the history of your coding projects like never before.
[…]
Git Repositories are now an intrinsic part of Kaleidoscope. They show up automatically as you start comparing files that reside in git working directories.
[…]
From the sidebar of a git-backed changeset, you can now open the history or any file in that changeset. This lets you learn how that file evolved over time. And in the opposite direction, when finding interesting changes in the history of a file, you can now quickly see the changeset of an entire commit.
The new Git features are great. I’m finding myself using Kaleidoscope alongside Tower for certain tasks. Kaleidoscope doesn’t even attempt to do most of what Tower does, but there are times when it’s quicker or better to open up a comparison or file history in Kaleidoscope.
I really like how the main Kaleidoscope window keeps a history of recent comparisons, both globally and per-repository. In the initial 5.0 version, opening the Git file history was really slow, but this was quickly fixed, and now the speed is on-par with Tower, with Kaleidoscope tracking some revisions through renames that Tower missed. It’s very easy to select two specific versions of a file to compare, and you can quickly move down the list and see the commit messages for each version, but it’s awkward to quickly zip through the changes for the versions (which in Tower you can do just by pressing the Down Arrow key).
The subscription price has dipped slightly from $99/year to $96/year.
Florian Albrecht:
Kaleidoscope 5 introduces a groundbreaking feature that allows users to effortlessly open the changeset for any Git commit. This feature comes in two distinct forms tailored to accommodate all macOS applications: one leveraging a system service and the other integrated with Kaleidoscope Prism. Both options can be further optimized by adding a keyboard shortcut for swift execution.
See also: Filipe Espósito.
Previously:
Developer Tool Git Kaleidoscope Mac Mac App macOS 14 Sonoma Programming
