Filegazer Wins Out

Apple’s OS X’s Dock and Donelleschi’s Filegazer are at the starting line. You’re sending them out to browse your Finder for a folder or hard drive that you regularly use. Your Dock is at the bottom or on either side of your screen, overloaded with several applications. You wish you could dock more folders there, but it’s already crowed with so many icons it’s hard to distinguish them. Plus, the Dock simply gets in the way of the rest of your work. Even when you use Hide the Dock, it’s still not enough.

So starting your search, you send out Dock and Filegazer to bring up say your folder of freelance articles. Already, Apple’s Dock gets off to a slower start. You have to pull your mouse over to the Dock, find the folder, and click to get access. But Filegazer jumps ahead, giving you instant access—delivering your desired folder from the either side or the bottom of your desktop screen where you “preferenced” it to appear in less than a second.

Without a slow motion re-run, Filegazer wins over the Dock as a browser application.

I just downloaded the trial version of Filegazer 1.2 last night and I’m already hooked. So far I’m using it to get at a couple of folders and hard drive disks I regularly use but don’t want sitting in my Dock. 

It’s hard to believe how fast this application does it work. I especially like the preview feature which instantly shows the content of JPEG photos, QuickTime movies, PDFs, TextEdit and Microsoft Word documents. The application is seriously a time saver.

Donelleschi.com/filegazer provides a Flash movie that shows all the features of the program, so I don’t need to say much more than what it shows.

However, I can add a few tips from my own experience using it so far. First off, I would set at least 4 seconds as the lapse time for a designated folder to appear because otherwise, designated folders will almost instantly jump out every time you mouse over to a designated spot, which means that you’ll have to click at the top of a Filegazer finder window to get to go away. When you set it for four seconds, it really doesn’t taken that long, it just means that a browser menu won’t pop out so quickly. Even at a four second time lapse, Filegazer is faster than the Dock or the Finder.

There’s also a modifier keys option that you can set so that a browser menu will only activate when the mouse moves to an active margin of the screen and you have one or more of the active modifier keys pressed. This is useful if you have Filegazer menus set up to appear in the same areas you have activated for Apple’s Dashboard, Spotlight and Expose applications. However, for some reason Filegazer’s Activation Modifier is not working for me. I wrote them to find out why.

Another nice feature of this application is the ability to change the menu browser skin for any of the seven spots you activate on the margins of your screen. My favorite is the cool California Sunrise color. 

Filegazer is a shareware program. It looks as though you could use it fully featured without registration, but you get a little reminder to pay up about every five or six times you click to an browser menu. Though the $19.95 is a little high for this application, it’s worth it. You can also get it bundled with four other Donelleschi time saving applications that are also pretty fun to use.