FinderPop is Back!

FinderPop is back! I almost can't believe it, I'm so excited. FinderPop was one of those Mac OS 9 utilities that I absolutely couldn't live without. It made my days with Mac OS 9 bearable. And now this essential utility is available for Mac OS X.

Here's how I use it. If you're like me, you tend to download a lot of graphics files, PDF's, and video files from the Internet. And while most of us know that it's easy to set the default application to be used to open, for instance, and .avi file, there's no easy way to select which application you want to open a particular file. And so you end up right-clicking on a file and navigating to the "Open With" contextual menu option and then waiting for your system to offer you a list of which applications can open that type of file. It works but is a bit cumbersome. FinderPop makes this process a lot easier by allowing you to list aliases to desired applications directly in the Finder's contextual menu. Like so:

And you can do this with any application and file types. Open a text file in a list of chosen word processors, or a PDF file with Preview instead of Acrobat Reader. Use DropStuff to stuff your files.

Of course you could litter your Dock with all these applications and get the same type of functionality, but I think FinderPop is a much slicker and more efficient way to manage this type of file/application launching.

Once you've gotten the hang of the core functionality of FinderPop, you'll discover there are many more things you can do with it. The included readme file explains.

FinderPop for Mac OS X is still in beta, but the author is actively working on it. Hooray, hooray, FinderPop is here to stay!