Solving common A Better Finder Rename 7 for Mac OS X problems

All Leopard Problems.v7

If you are using Leopard you should upgrade to the latest version of A Better Finder Rename.

Leopard: Where has the "A Better Finder Rename..." context menu gone?v7

Apple in their infinite wisdom have decided that non-Apple context menu plug-ins should not appear in the main context menu and have relegated them into the "More" submenu at the bottom of the context menu.

Upgrading woes?v7v6

If you have accidentally overwritten your existing ABFR version with a newer update, that would force you to pay for an upgrade fee, you can download an older version from this page.

For downgrading from version 7 (or later) to an earlier version, please refer to the relevant section of the installation page.

How to Uninstall?v7

Follow the instructions on the installation manual page.

How to Uninstall?v6

If you want to uninstall ABFR, run the installer and select the "Uninstall" option in the popup menu.

You may find that on Mac OS X the icon in the "System Preferences..." menu does no go away immediately. Don't worry all files have been removed but the System Preferences application has an internal cache.

The icon will go away by itself the next time the cache is updated, but if you want to give it a bit of a helping hand you can remove the cache file:

[home]/Library/Caches/com.apple.preferencepanes.cache

Problems during start up.v7

ABFR 7 stops working after a while or just after an upgrade. This indicates corrupted or incorrect startup files.

If you experience this problem, there is a simple solution to it:

1) quit the application if it is running

2) got to Home:Library:Preferences (where Home is your personal home folder)

3) got to Home:Library:Preferences (where Home is your personal home folder)

4) remove the "net.publicspace.abfr7.plist" file (if it exists)

5) remove the "A Better Finder Rename Pref" file (if it exists)

6) restart ABFR; it should work now

After renaming the files they no longer open properly!v7v6

Don't worry, you haven't lost any data. You have probably simply removed the file extension and Mac OS X no longer knows what type of document your file represents.

You can resolve this by adding the original file extension (say .jpg) to the end of the file names. They should then open properly again.

I'm confused because file extensions (.jpg, .txt, etc.) appear or disappear.v7v6

File extensions can be tricky on Mac OS X. Under certain conditions the Finder hides file extensions: they are still there, but cannot be seen in the Finder.

You can find out the real name of a file by selecting it in the Finder, and choosing "Get Info..." from the "File" menu. The "true" name of the file can be seen in the "Name & Extension:" field.

A Better Finder Rename always shows the full name of the file, so drag & dropping the files into the preview window will also do the trick.

In general, your selection in the "Change:" popup menu determines whether ABFR will change only the file name (everything before the first period) or the file name and the extension.

You can force the Finder to always show file extensions by ticking the "Show all file extensions" check box in the "Preferences..." menu of the Finder.

You can show or hide file extensions for individual files by (un-)ticking the "Hide extension" check box in the Finder's "Get Info". A Better Finder Attributes allows to perform this operation for multiple files

Problems renaming large numbers of files under Mac OS X 10.2/3/4?v7v6

The Mac OS X Finder can be very slow when you select more than a hundred or so files. This is especially noticeable when you use context menus. For each selected file the Finder needs to create an "AppleEventDescriptor Record" that it forwards to the context menu (or the launching application). When you select a lot of files (say a couple of hundred) the Finder can take a lot of time doing this. There is a simple solution. Instead of selecting all the files in the folder, select the folder and use the "Process subfolders and their contents" feature. If you do not want to rename ALL the files in the folder, you can use A Better Finder Select to filter the files (e.g. all files ending in ".gif") before invoking ABFR. It is also quicker to use the Command-Control-R hot key or dropping the files onto the dock item than to use the context menu. This is no longer a problem under Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

How do I go about transferring files to a Windows machine?v7v6

You can use A Better Finder Rename's "Convert to valid NTFS/SMB file name" feature to ensure that your file names are valid for Windows NTFS volumes.

You may still encounter some problems when transferring files over an SMB (remotely mounted Windows drives) connection to the Windows machine. These problems are due to two factors: invisible files and SMB bugs.

You can remove invisible files before transferring your files by using A Better Finder Attributes (the companion product to A Better Finder Rename); Mac OS X's SMB implementation is plagued by bugs, but you may not run into them. If you do run into them the best course of action is to "compress" the files you want to transfer into a single zip archive using the Finders "Compress" feature, transfer the archive and then unzip it on the other side.

Something isn't working and I have FruitMenu, WindowShade X, Labels X or anything else using Unsanity's Application Enhancer installed.

With Application Enhancer installed, all bets are off. This is "wicked cool" software specifically designed to undermine OS X's built-in protection features.

Uninstall it and see whether the problem persists.

Blaming other people for your bugs is plain bad manners, so in our defense let us quote George Warner from Apple Developer Technical Support:

Our (Apple's) official policy is that we don't support APE'd systems. Period. The data miner that parses all the crash logs that are sent to us automatically ignores any report that has APE api's in the backtraces or dylb lists.

Likewise If DTS receives a crash incident with API in the backtrace or dylb list we will not investigate it. Our "standard answer" in this case is to inform the developer that we don't support APE and that we'll only be able to help them if they can reproduce the problem without APE installed.

I would suggest that you do the same for your "user X". ;-)

Trouble with tab delimited file listsv7

This is probably the most difficult to use feature in the program as it requires some knowledge about Mac OS X internals and rigorous attention to detail.

There are two major sources of problems:

the file list loads fine but nothing happens!
an error message appears when I load my file list

The first problem is easily resolved. The program loads the entire file list, but does not automatically add the files and folders in the list to the preview!

You need to drag & drop the files you want to rename into the preview list as usual. The program will then use the associations in the file list to determine the correct new names. This is done for consistency with the other renaming features and allows you (if you desire to do so) to perform a partial rename, ie. rename only some of the files in the file list.

The error message in the second problem may have a number of different reasons but all indicate that your file list is incorrect.

Re-read the instructions in the manual carefully: this is one area where details really are important!

The most common errors are:

the left hand part is not a complete POSIX path, but only the old name. This won't work!
the file that the POSIX path points to does not exist. Spelling mistake? File deleted?
you have a slash in your file name. Carefully re-read the section on the "forward slash" translation.

If you still can't figure out what's wrong, please email me directly at reiff@publicspace.net and don't forget to attach your file list and the full text of the error message that you receive. I will try to answer as quickly as possible, but it may take a day or two..

Any other bug at all. Especially right after a new version is released.

Email us immediately! It could be that many other people have the same problem. We can only fix the problems that we know about.

We do test each version carefully before a release, but with so many different factors (OS version, installed products, specific hardware, installers, builds, etc..) to consider, it is always possible that a bug does get into a release.

Unfortunately occasionally a bug affecting all users goes unreported for days and causes no end of frustration for everyone. Simply dropping us a line would allow us to fix the problem immediately.. don't be afraid of getting in touch!