Refresh the Finder

Before Tiger one of the things people complained about the Finder was its lack of a "Refresh" command along the lines of F5 in the Windows Explorer. Supposedly this was fixed in Tiger with automatic refresh, but as we've noted in one of our Ask TUAW columns, sometimes it doesn't quite seem to work. Having had enough of this, Samuel Svensson decided to do something about it and wanted to add a refresh button to the Finder similar to the one in Safari. He wrote this simple application, which is actually just a wrapper around a simple AppleScript:

tell application "Finder"
tell front window
update every item with necessity
end tell
end tell

The nifty part is that it is just a regular application you place in your Applications folder. It merely has a very small icon so that when you drag it onto your Finder toolbar (as we just covered in Mac 101), it looks like a Finder button. In fact, it isn't a hack or plug-in of any sort. Cool idea.

Refresh the Finder is a free download from design firm Söderhavet.

Thanks, Fredrik!