SOFTWARE OF THE DAY - A BETTER FINDER RENAME & BEAN

Hi All, Key Combination of the Day Command-L in the Finder Pressing -L (Command-L) in the Finder (Desktop) creates an alias of the currently selected item(s). An alias is a "pointer" to the actual item. (When Microsoft copied this Mac feature they called it a "shortcut"... Windows users may be familiar with this term.) Many times you may want an icon on the Desktop (or elsewhere) to click on to quickly access something (an application, document, folder, etc.). Creating an alias of the item allows you to have just that without having to move the original from its current location. Shareware of the Day: A Better Finder Rename - Feature-packed multiple-file renaming with EXIF, MP3, instant preview, multi-step renames and reg ex support. A Better Finder Rename is the most comprehensive file renaming solution for the Macintosh and transforms the tedious and time-consuming task of renaming multiple files into a simple matter of seconds. The new version 7 is the result of 10 years of listening to our customers in the digital photography, content creation and post-production domains. The simple, easy-to-use interface makes it accessible to anyone, but hides an abundance of powerful renaming options. New In Version 7: Completely rewritten in Cocoa to offer best-of-breed interface Detachable, fully resizable instant preview window Combine multiple steps into a single multi-step rename Simple drag & drop installation, full control over which components are installed Operate as stand-alone application Drag & drop files into the preview window Improved renaming from file lists (imported from Excel, database, etc.) Unicode support for international users Over 100 tweaks and refinements Comprehensive renaming options: add, remove, insert and replace characters and text add, format, change and insert sequence numbers, create numbered lists.. add file date and time, rename to date.. convert file names to Windows NTFS, SMB, DOS, Mac OS 9, etc. perform case conversions and much, much more. Work the way that suits you best You can use A Better Finder Rename as a stand-alone application, dragging & dropping files onto the application icon or directly into the preview window. Alternatively you can use it straight from the Finder using either the context menu or the command-control-R hot key combination. You can leave it open or close it automatically after each rename. What you see is what you get See the results of your renaming options while you are typing. The instant preview can be attached to the main dialog or detached into a separate resizable window for extra space. When you use the separate preview window, you can dock it to the right, top or bottom of the main dialog so that it will move along with the main window. You can add and remove files conveniently via drag & drop. Highly configurable processing Separate processing for file names and file extensions Process files, folders and subfolders Choose to confirm each file name or process them all automatically Uses different renaming mechanisms for situations where remote or external file systems are not 100% mac compatible Combine multiple rename steps You can combine several rename actions into a single multi-step rename. This allows you to perform even the most complex renaming jobs in a single pass. A Better Finder Rename allows you to create as many rename steps as you require and lets you edit and re-arrange them at will. Digital PhotograpyEXIF A Better Finder Rename is the preferred renaming tool of many professional and ambitious amateur photographers and has over time grown an impressive array of features dedicated to manipulating sequence numbers (create sequence number lists, add and insert sequence numbers, pad them with 0s, add & substract from the existing numbers) and adding shooting dates & times to picture names. In these operations you can exploit the shooting date & time extracted from the industry-standard EXIF digital camera meta-data stored in your JPEG, CRW (Canon), CR2 (Canon), THM (Canon), NEF (Nikon), TIFF, RAJ (Fuji), ORF (Olympus), MRW (Minolta), DNG (Abobe), Pentax (PEF) or SRF (Sony) pictures. Installation à la carte Simply drag & drop the application icon to your hard disk to install it. You can choose which optional components you wish to install, the first time you launch the tool. You may naturally change the configuration at any time from the preferences menu. The optional components include the context menu plug-in, the Finder hot key and the System Preferences pane. Uninstall simply by removing the components using the preferences menu and trashing the application. MP3/AAC Renaming Music collections can quickly get very large and more than a little messy. Using consistent music file naming is a great help in organising your collection. A Better Finder Rename can read the track, album and artist information embedded in your MP3, AAC and iTunes Music Store files and create new, homogenous, file names. Pro Workflow Support Save recurring renaming options to self-contained "droplet" applications. Drag & drop files and folders onto these droplets to apply the stored settings. This allows you to automate the renaming part of your workflow. Webmasters and system administrators alike will appreciate the ability to rename files to legal Windows NTFS/ SMB file names before uploading them to a Windows server. Another unique advanced feature of A Better Finder Rename is its ability to import names from BBEdit, Microsoft Excel and any other application that exports plain or tab-delimited text files. This ability allows A Better Finder Rename to be integrated into many custom workflows. Features for power users For those that need even more advanced features, we provide regular expression substitution support. This advanced string manipulation technique was popularized by UNIX and PERL geeks and is best known on the Mac through BBEdit's search and replace support. Definitely not for the faint of heart, regular expressions are none the less an excellent tool for finding, replacing and swapping text fragments. More info and download link here: <http://www.publicspace.net/ABetterFinderRename/index.html> Freeware of the Day: Bean - a Word Processor for OS X. What Bean is and does Bean is a small, easy-to-use word processor that features: a live word count a Get Info panel for in-depth statistics a zoom-slider to easily change the view scale an Inspector panel with lots of sliders date-stamped backups autosaving a page layout mode an alternate colors option (e.g., white text on blue) an option to show invisible characters (tabs, returns, spaces) selection of text by text style, paragraph style, color, etc. a floating windows option (like Stickies has) easy to use menus remembers cursor postion (excluding .txt, .html, .webarchive formats) all of Cocoa's good stuff (dictionary, word completion, etc.)     Why use Bean? Bean is lean, fast, and uncluttered. If you get depressed at the thought of firing up MS Word or OpenOffice, try Bean. If you use Text Edit but have to jump through hoops just to get a word count or change the margins, try Bean. If you're pining away for Write Now-esque simplicity or just want a low-pressure writing environment, try Bean. File Formats Bean natively reads and writes these file formats: .rtf format (rich text) .rtfd format (rich text with graphics) .bean format (identical to .rtfd) .txt format (Unicode and legacy) .html format (as source code) .webarchive format (Apple's web archive format)     Bean transparently imports and exports these formats: .doc format (MS Word '97, minus images, margins, and page size) .xml format (MS Word 2003 XML, minus images) Bean can export all of the above formats to this format: .html (web page format, minus images)     What Bean doesn't do Bean doesn't do footnotes, customized headers and footers, columns, pre-defined text styles, floating graphics (but it does do in-line graphics). More info and download link here: <http://www.bean-osx.com/Bean.html> Regards... Gordon