For most people, the Finder is everything a file manager could be. With Leopard, the Finder received a much needed facelift, along with the addition of some nifty features like Cover Flow, Quick Look, enhanced networking, and a bunch of changes here and there. But it didn’t address a lot of the concerns that the so called “power users” had with the it. In other words, the changes were mostly just skin deep.

Those who have wanted added functionality have had to turn to Path Finder. Recently out with its fifth version, CocoaTech’s Path Finder is everything anyone could ever ask for from a file manager, if that is what you’re looking for. It is a feature overloaded piece of software that leaves no stone unturned in giving you absolutely every single option you could be looking for. I have never used Path Finder before, so I shall explore this in detail rather than just going through what has changed. Will this new application stay in my Dock or am I happy and content with Leopard’s default Finder? Read on for a lengthy review, loaded with screenshots, to get a glimpse of what Path Finder is like.

On First Launch

When Path Finder first loads, it looks very similar to the default Finder, and yet is so very different. The basic look is the same—the sidebar is populated with the same items as your default Finder and it sort of has similar buttons at the top. But this is where the similarity ends, as you begin to notice that there are a whole lot of new elements. Everything is miniaturised to make room for the additional elements. Even the icons, by default, are smaller than what you would see in the Finder.

The first look gives you the distinct impression that this as a power tool, something that goes beyond what an average user would want or need, and I’m sure it’s going to take me a while to burrow through the rest of the stuff that’s hidden under the controls.

The Different View Options

A file manager is all about how it lets you access your files. With a bunch of different view options, Path Finder pushes the Finder UI to the extreme.

Cover Flow detached
With Leopard, the Finder brought in a new view, Cover Flow. Unfortunately, the supplementary view to go with the dancing icons is fixed as the list view. You cannot view folders in neither the column nor the icon view while in Cover Flow. Path Finder has clubbed the three main views together and made Cover Flow a separate control. Yes, even the column view is possible with Cover Flow.

Note that this Cover Flow seems to have been built by their own team as it supports some different animation effects when switching folders. I did notice a performance issue when scrolling through; it’s a little choppy at best.

Path Bar
Another option that Leopard brought with it was the Path Bar. It’s very effective for knowing where you are while in Cover Flow (to make up for the lack of the column view, I guess) and allows for some drag and drop functionality. Path Finder also brings the Path Bar but, to the best of my knowledge, provides no additional improvements to it. They could have at least made it function like Vista’s breadcrumb bar, which is a far more functional version of the Path Bar in Leopard. The UI of the Path Bar is also a little too in-your-face, what with the dark blue highlight of the selected tab. It would have been much better to have just used the default Leopard Path Bar.

Tabs!
Yes, indeed. This is a long standing feature request of “Finderaholics” and Path Finder has got it. The tabs look very similar to Safari, although moving them around is a little clunky. And you cannot drag ’em out like you can in Safari. However, dragging files from one tab to another is as simple as dragging them over and hitting the spacebar, much like you’d expect. You can, of course, have different views for either of the tabs.

Dual-browser mode
This is a very common view among file managers. The sidebar stays the same but the right side splits into two separate windows. You can have separate views for each of them and customise the viewing options. It can be of great help when dragging and dropping. I’m not too much in favour of Dual-browsing panes though, as they create a lot of clutter and confusion to be very useful. The column view is more than enough for dragging files around. Still, for those of you who need it, it’s very much there.

Two side panels, and a bottom panel.
By clicking the icons on the status bar at the bottom, one can swing out the panels that come from either sides, and at the bottom. The Path Finder window smoothly resizes on invoking either of these panels so you don’t have to run around trying to find space. The bottom one sports a fully functional tabbed terminal (there’s another power user feature!). The side panels, on the other hand, can be customised to the bone! The Path Finder team seems to have crammed in every possible feature (choice is king here), so you can have anything from Cover Flow, recent documents, file info, or even access to your iTunes library in the sidebar. The UI decisions, however, are not optimal. The scrollbars appear under the shadow of the window, making it very hard to access them.

Preview pane
Path Finder has yet another pane, the Preview pane. Two panels load inside the window, unlike the side and bottom panels. You can make them show any of the various options like Preview, file info, or (gosh!) another Cover Flow pane.

Features

Path Finder is filled to the brim with features. They’re there when you need ’em and out of your way when you don’t.

Bookmarks Bar
Right above the browser lies a bookmarks bar. While it looks very similar to the one in Safari, it serves the function of giving you quick access to all your files and folders, wherever they may be in your home folder or anywhere else on the hard drive. By default, you get all your “Places” as well as Applications in the bookmark bar. You can also add files or folders to it by merely dragging them up there. This way you could drag up your Macintosh HD up there and navigate right through your entire mac!

Drop Stack
Path Finder features a sort of virtual box where you can collect files and then compress them at once, burn them, or email them. Say you have a bunch of file scattered on your hard drive that you want to email someone. Just keep adding them to the drop stack, and you can all to Mail with a single click.

Search
Apart from being able to spawn a regular Finder window on typing into the Search field, Path Finder can filter the results of the current folder by name, extension, or kind. It also has a special search panel, much like the one we saw in Tiger.

StuffIt Integration
While OS X can natively decompress ‘ZIP’ files, Path Finder integrates StuffIt for decompression, so you can get inside ‘RAR’, ‘ZIP’, and all kinds of files supported by the StuffIt Unarchiver. 

Multiple Sidebars
This one almost slipped my attention. In addition to the standard sidebar, you can create another one, for whatever reason. You can then organise your Places differently or have different saved searches. The utility of this is highly questionable but, for what it’s worth, it’s there and it works.

Size Browser

Very often you find that your disk space is being eaten up but you just can’t put your finger on the rogue file or folder. The size browser generates folder and file sizes for any folder you navigate to. So, if you start from the top—i.e. your Macintosh HD—you can very well locate which are the rogue folders. 

Secure Delete
In addition to just moving stuff to the trash, you can now securely delete any files you want. Choose from a single pass overwrite, seven of them, or even 35 passes. You can then be sure that your files can never be retrieved.

Text Editor
Path Finder features its own text editor. There are a few differences from TextEdit like, for instance, the integration of the search bar into the UI and the ability to activate URLs. A weird thing I noticed about the search bar is that there are no next/previous buttons anywhere! So searching is pretty much defunct. Feature or no feature, I’d still go with the familiar TextEdit.

What I didn’t like

The user interface seems to have taken second place in this whole shebang. Features, features, features. Icons are roughly cut and the typography is, I shudder to even think this, Linux-like! For instance, they have tried their own implementation of the Path Bar, while the one on OS X is fine enough. The preview panes feature so much information, in a small font, that looking at it makes me cringe.

The search has also been tampered with. I understand their need to provide different ways of searching but keep the default one as it is. There is no search-as-you-type and you have to hit enter and wait a while for the results to be generated.

In Conclusion

At the risk of sounding repetitive, Path Finder is a very feature rich application. I’m very sure I have missed over 50% of them in this review. There’s something for everyone. And while I crib about how the UI becomes a little messy, you can just as well turn all those things off and have a regular old Finder-like window.

The question here is, which of these features is worth your money? If you feel the need for a better file manager, you will find Path Finder very accommodating. Personally, I don’t have many files to manage, and most of the ones I do have, I access via Stacks and Spotlight, so having all this functionality wouldn’t be of much use to me.

Path Finder 5 costs $40 for a full license and $20 for an upgrade from the previous version. Of course, to decide on where or not you want it, you have 30 days to go through the entire package using the free trial. Let us know whether it will replace your Finder.

In Reviews on 4 Nov, 2008| |