29th February 2012
This version is to provide information about the immediate availability of A Better Finder Rename 9.
You cannot use this software auto-updating mechanism to upgrade to version 9 and will need to download and install the program "manually". This version of A Better Finder Rename will provide you with customized information about how to upgrade based on your existing unlock code.
Version 9 is a free upgrade for anybody who has purchased A Better Finder Rename 8 after the 1st of January 2011 or who owns a forever upgrade.
Discounted upgrades start at $9.95 for a single user license. Forever upgrades start at $19.95.
4th January 2012
The new version if necessary attempts to perform renames using a range of different renaming mechanisms to ensure better compatibility with third party and remote file systems.
6th December 2011
The new version fixes a bug in the id3 tag reading engine.
2nd November 2011
The new version now supports full screen mode in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.
19th October 2011
The new version improves the thumbnail preview in the confirmation dialog and squashes a potential crashing bug.
Note: Version 8.90 was only released on the App Store, but contains only a partial fix for the crashing bug mentioned above. It should make this issue much less frequent but does not totally eliminate it. Version 8.91 will be submitted to the Mac App Store today, but will need to go through the approval process which can take up to two weeks.
28th September 2011
The new version adds the ability to expand camel case.
8th September 2011
This new version makes a very minor change to meet Mac App Store submission guidelines.
7th September 2011
This new version fixes a minor problem with the new music tag reading engine.
17th August 2011
This new version adds support for reading music meta information in FLAC, AIFF, M4V, OGG and APE files.
20th July 2011
This new version introduces a new "Lion mode" for renaming files more efficiently on Mac OS X 10.7.
This mode is automatically pre-selected when the program is first run on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.
14th July 2011
The new version fixes a problem that would cause the new ID3 tag reading engine not to find track number and CD number information.
12th July 2011
The new version adds a new ID3 tag reading engine that can process your music files up to ten times faster than the old engine.
15th June 2011
The new version deals more gracefully with symbolic links.
10th May 2011
This release improves the way that progress information is displayed:
The new version also contains a number of minor bug fixes.
20th April 2011
This release fixes a crashing bug reported yesterday and a cosmetic problem.
6th April 2011
This is a maintance release addressing a number of minor issues.
9th March 2011
This release fixes a color space problem that made some JPEG file previews seem hazy and makes a number of minor tweaks now that new A Better Finder Rename 8 releases have abandonned Leopard-compatibility.
28th February 2011
This is the first Snow Leopard only release of A Better Finder Rename. The internals of the program have been thoroughly modernized and a lot of Mac OS X 10.5 legacy code has been removed in preparation for work starting on ensuring that A Better Finder Rename will be fully Mac OS X 10.7 Lion-compatible.
15th February 2011
This release adds an option to allow the logging of debug information to the console to be switched off. We recommend that you leave this switched on as it greatly facilitates debugging and helps us provide you with a bug-free product.
This is also probably going to be the last Mac OS 10.5 Leopard compatible release.
We usually support the current version of Mac OS X and one previous version to allow customers plenty of time to upgrade.
Apple has, however, made a number of moves in the last few weeks that make it harder than ever to maintain backwards compatibility. The Mac App Store requires that code be targeted to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and Apple's XCode 4 development tools that have gone to Gold Master last week have dropped the Mac OS X 10.5 SDK and PowerPC support entirely.
We now spend a lot of time maintaining backwards compatibility and separate code bases and A Better Finder Rename is dragging a lot of legacy code, such as preferences panes, contextual menu plug-ins and PowerPC compatibility around with it.
In other words, the time has come to get ready for Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and drop Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard compatibility a few months early.
Obviously, the current, I hope you'll agree, very capable 8.76 release will remain on the website indefinitely and we've made sure that the auto-update feature won't overwrite your current version with an incompatible Mac OS X 10.6-only version by mistake.
For Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard users, the next few point releases will deliver a smaller, faster and modernized A Better Finder Rename.
29th January 2011
This is a minor release making it easier to purchase from the Mac App Store.
26th January 2011
This release adds the option for new users to buy A Better Finder Rename 8 from the Mac App Store.
A Better Finder Rename is now available on the Mac App Store under the name "Better Rename 8".
Apple asked us to change the product name to remove the "Finder" reference.
A Better Finder Rename 8 will continue to be available from our own web site and we will obviously honour forever upgrades and continue to offer discounted major upgrades and bundles. In other words, nothing will change for existing customers nor will new customers be treated any different.
The decision to buy on the Mac App Store or directly from us is a matter of your personal preference. We are happy either way.
Please understand that if you buy from the Mac App Store, you buy into Apple's way of running things and we us developers have very limited influence over how Apple manages the Mac App Store.
19th January 2011
This release adds two new text moving actions:
23rd December 2010
This release fixes the droplet feature which was broken amid Mac App Store changes for version 8.71. Sorry.
14th December 2010
This release delivers the first installement of new text moving actions.
10th November 2010
This release makes performance and memory management improvements.
13th October 2010
This release makes further improvements to the unicode handling.
30th September 2010
This is a minor update that:
15th September 2010
This release adds new options for inserting space saving alphabetical sequences into file names.
6th September 2010
This release fixes a bug in the 'Insert Sequence Number At Position' renaming action introduced in the last release.
25th August 2010
This release adds the abilitity to insert file path components to the front or the back of existing text or at a particular position.
11th August 2010
This release introduces a new category of renaming actions allowing you to insert path components in a variety of ways.
21st July 2010
The new release improves the compatibility of the "rename from file list" feature with tab delimited text files exported from Mircosoft Excel.
14th July 2010
The new release adds new renaming actions to the folder name category:
23rd June 2010
The new release fixes a rare crashing bug.
2nd June 2010
The new release provides three additional ways of inserting roman numerals into file names:
10th May 2010
The new release updates the help book with advice on how to best handle very large renaming jobs.
20th April 2010
The new release allows the automatic loading of EXIF information for image files to be switched off.
This can result in a huge performance boost for all renaming actions that do not require this information, especially when working with large files over a network.
Disabling the feature will, however, lead to incorrect sorting when using the EXIF information.
Our advice would be to leave the option switched on unless you are looking at very large jobs over a network.
13th April 2010
This new release adds an option to disable the Quick Look thumbnail creation for the confirmation dialog.
While it can be a great help to see a thumbnail of each picture or document that you are about to rename, if you are working with very large file sizes (e.g. digital camera raw files, medical scans, huge PDFs, etc.) or with files on a slow server, the thumbnail creation can become very slow.
As this is not such a common scenario, by default thumbnail creation remains switched off.
For those special jobs, however, where the thumbnail creation process is slowing you down, you can now disable it in the "Preferences..." dialog and you will be presented with the item's icon instead.
7th April 2010
This release adds support for random sorting in the sequence number, roman numerals and alphabetical sequence renaming actions.
23rd March 2010
This release fixes a minor bug that would allow the multi-step drawer to be closed but not re-opened under a set of infrequent conditions.
10th March 2010
The new release allows droplets to be locked so that they cannot be edited by double clicking them. This can be useful for system administrators who need to distribute droplets to end-user and want to avoid them being edited by mistake.
3rd March 2010
This release adds a new action that removes all diacritical marks (accents, umlauts, etc) from file names.
24th February 2010
This release further improves the handling of international character sets and fixes a minor bug.
2nd February 2010
This release adds a new "Replace using regular expressions" action to the "Advanced & Special" category that acts in a way familiar to most software developers and unix geeks.
The action that was formerly known under that name is still available as "Re-arrange using regular expressions" and continues to work as before. You should not have any problems with your existing droplets or presets.
Please note that regular expressions are an advanced feature, that may be completely unsuitable for casual computer users. They are very powerful, but basically also represent a particularly cryptic programming language in their own right and have a big learning curve. The documentation links to external resources for learning about regular expressions.
29th January 2010
This new release fixes a problem introduced by the additional safety checks in version 8.49 released two days ago.
The problem occured only when you were attempting to change the case of a file name (e.g. convert to uppercase, lowercase, sentence case). In this scenario version 8.49 would refuse to rename the file because a file of the same name already existed (HFS+ is case preserving but not case sensitive).
27th January 2010
This is a recommended update for all 8.x users. It fixes an extremely rare but potentially serious bug.
20th January 2010
This is a minor update that removes the current restriction of the step value in the sequence number actions having to be no greater than 255.
6th January 2010
This new version replaces the old RegExLib regular expression library with its modern RegExLibLite counterpart that uses the ICU library that is built into Leopard and Snow Leopard. This should result in faster regular expressions processing and more elegant international character set handling, as well as cutting down on the application size.
The next version of A Better Finder Rename 8 will deliver further enhancements based on this new library. There are detailed differences between the old and the new libraries, but this should not have much effect on run-of-the-mill regular expressions use. Please consult the "Help" menu for more information.
The new version also makes the accurate but very slow calculation of folder sizes introduced in 8.43 optional and switches it off by default. If you need accurate folder and bundle sizes you can switch this feature on in the preferences. Calculating the size of a folder involves calculating the size of all the files and sub-folders that it contains and can thus be very slow (try Get Info... in the Finder). This speed penality can't be justified if like most people you never use the "sort by file size" feature.
The new version fixes a minor bug that could cause the preset description not to be saved correctly.
The new version fixes two minor bugs:
The new version adds support for using roman numerals in file names.
You can produce a roman numeral list (e.g. Chapter I, Chapter II, etc.) or insert roman numerals at the beginning or end of the file name.
The new version now correctly calculates the size of bundle files.
Improves unicode support for better international character set support.
This bug fix release is a recommended upgrade for all users of versions 8.39 and 8.40.
Version 8.39 introduced a regression that broke the handling of case sensitive file names.
This release makes signifcant improvements to the "rename from file list" feature.
It introduces a new simplified way of specifying current name/ new name pairs in tab delimited text files to complement the existing full path/ new name format. It also features several minor improvements in error reporting, saving file lists, updates the documentation regarding these features, etc.
This release addresses a potentially serious bug and is a recommended upgrade for all A Better Finder Rename 8 users.
This releases fixes a bug affecting fast typists only.
The new release dramatically speeds up the file comments (aka spotlight comments) protection feature introduced in the previous version.
The new release is a recommended upgrade for all A Better Finder Rename 8 users with an up-to-date Leopard or Snow Leopard installation.
It prevents file comment comment loss by explictly copying the file comments from the old file to the "new" file. This behaviour can be switchd off in the preferences but is switched on by default.
Apple's file comment (aka Spotlight comment) implementation is notoriously fragile with file comments disappearing for all kinds of reasons, including moving files to non HFS+ volumes, deleting .DS_Store files, moving files outside of the Finder (e.g. via the terminal), saving documents to new locations, archiving and un-archiving files, putting them under version control, etc, etc. For that reason, we strongly advise against using file comments to keep track of important data.
It appears that after taking several years to (recently) fix file comment loss for many standard API calls, Apple have managed to "break" file comments again with recent updates to Leopard and Snow Leopard (worked on 10.6.0). It is thus possible that you will lose file comments if you use previous versions of A Better Finder Rename.
This release fixes a cosmetic issue on Snow Leopard and enables Command-W closing of the application.
Earlier today, version 8.34 was posted with a minor display bug. If you have downloaded that version please update it.
This release contains significant improvements to the handling of unlock codes and should make unlocking the product significantly less error prone.
Fixes a rare problem with composed unicode characters affecting the "rename from file list" feature.
The new release allows A Better Finder Rename to be used as part of your ImageCapture workflow on Snow Leopard.
The new release includes a new version of the preferences pane that handles system with a legacy A Better Finder Launcher installation more gracefully.
It also fixes a minor bug where the number of renamed files was reported incorrectly under particular circumstances.
Addresses a problem when trying to rename files containing a forward slash on Snow Leopard.
Snow Leopard specific changes only:
This release adds an "A Better Finder Rename 8..." menu item to the services menu and allows A Better Finder Rename to be started by selecting files in the Finder or other applications via the "Services" menu.
This also means that the new release is now Snow Leopard compatible.
This release contains a number of enhancements:
This release contains multiple bug fixes for rare multi-threading issues:
The new release also improves the regular expression matching algorithm to more elegantly deal with unicode composed character sequences (e.g. French accents, umlauts, etc).
Fixes a bug affecting version 8.23.
The new release adds new ways of using MP3/AAC tags to rename rename music files:
Other changes:
If you are upgrading from version 8.19 (27th May) or 8.15 (22nd and 23rd of April), you might have to upgrade manually, by clicking on the link below:
Sorry for the inconvenience.
This release fixes an issue relating to how names that contain forward slashes are displayed.
This release delivers significant performance improvements and focuses on optimizing the renaming and file name computation.
This is the last of our performance and scalability related releases for a while and most users should notice dramatic speed improvements, especially on large renaming jobs.
The new version provides easy all-in-one error reporting and fixes compatibility with some G5-based systems.
This new version delivers an order of magnitude speed improvement for the conflict resolution feature.
Further improvements:
6th May 2009
The new version features an improved renaming engine that is faster, uses less memory and can process larger rename jobs.
It also resolves a crashing issue that affected some Mac OS X configurations under version 8.17.
24th April 2009
This release resolves some problems on older Macs equipped with G5 PowerPC processors.
23rd April 2009
This release cleans up some problems with yesterday's 8.15 release.
The move to 64-bit did not go as well with "The Big Mean Folder Machine" a few months ago and some bugs crept in that this releases fixes.
22nd April 2009
This release takes A Better Finder Rename 8 to a 64-bit garbage collected architecture and prepares the ground for important scalability and performance improvements that we hope to deliver in the next two releases.
A direct link to our brand-new support forums has been added to the "Help" menu and minor updates to the optional contextual menu plugin, hot key and system preferences modules are included.
Note also that our version numbering scheme has changed. Instead of the 8.x.x numbering we now use a 8.x scheme, where the "x" is simply the release number. This gives us more room for more frequent updates now that we have the automatic update feature firmly in place. Sorry if this causes any confusion for long term users; it's new but once you get used to the idea it's a win-win.
1st April 2009
This release fixes a bug affecting file name conflict resolution.
27th March 2009
This release fixes a bug affecting the conversion to legal Windows NTFS/SMB and Mac OS 9 file names.
18th March 2009
The new version protects iPhoto and iTunes libraries from accidental damage.
You should never directly rename files that are under the control of management application such as iPhoto and iTunes because you risk damaging meta-data held by such applications, such as albums, play lists, etc. You should first export the files you want to rename before changing their names.
A Better Finder Rename 8 now brings up a warning dialog when you attempt to make such a modification.
18th February 2009
This release improves the usability of the "Remove specific characters" and "Replace specific characters" actions to avoid confusion with similar text-based features.
9th February 2009
This release focuses on performance and memory utilization. The conflict resolution stage is now much faster for large jobs and the performance of all stages of the renaming pipeline has been improved.
27th January 2009
This update contains a fix for a problem that prevents the new preview list refreshing feature from working correctly when you abort a renaming operation.
14th January 2009
This release makes a long requested change to the behavior of the program.
This enables you to perform multiple renames one step at a time, but in general you should still prefer using the multi-step renaming feature, because this only resolves file name conflicts once and not multiple times giving you a cleaner result if intermediary steps cause file name conflicts.
The new behavior is switched on by default, so if you prefer the old behavior you need to switch it off in the "Preferences..." dialog box.
22nd December 2008
In a recent Mac OS X update, Apple have corrected a long standing bug that affected the renaming of files containing the forward slash character. This has made the workaround used by A Better Finder Rename to remedy this bug obsolete and prevented it from renaming such files correctly itself. This new release removes the workaround and restores A Better Finder Rename's ability to rename to file names containing forward slashes.
17th December 2008
This release fixes a bug in the preferences pane.
10th December 2008
This new release adds the ability to remove blocks of numbers from existing file names.