Filer: Easily create documents anywhere on your Mac
Since my girlfriend bought the M1 MacBook Air under my instigation, my girlfriend who was not used to the Mac has changed from the beginning to gradually being successfully tuned by the system. However, as a poor graduate student who needs to write documents and report at weekly group meetings, she has always disliked the design of macOS Finder. Whenever she right-clicked on the desktop to open the menu bar, New Folder and a bunch of useless options caught her eye. She kept complaining to me: “Why can’t Mac create a document with the right mouse button like Windows? Every time I have to open the launchpad, and then find Word and PowerPoint in a bunch of software, it’s so troublesome, it’s too inhumane Right.” Since she feels inhumane, I’ll write her an extension. Hence the birth of Filer.
A brief introduction to the development process of Filer
When I first designed Filer, I was afraid that Apple did not give developers enough APIs and permissions, so I planned to design it as a menu bar software, and under a certain path, the creation of documents was realized through the menu bar on the top. However, this idea was strongly ridiculed by his girlfriend: “It looks so stupid, why not put a New File option appear directly in the Finder, it’s so convenient~” The idea died in this early stage, after all, we had to listen to Party A Dad’s opinion.
Later, after consulting Apple’s development documentation for an hour, I finally found a more reliable API, Finder Sync. Apple’s official description of this API is:
Enhance the Finder’s user interface by adding badges, shortcut menu items, and toolbar buttons.
Simply put, it is an API that can create extensions for Finder.
The development process went smoothly without any setbacks, and the first version of Filer has been born smoothly. Because the function is relatively simple, in order to maintain the concise features, choose to create Filer as a menu bar software, the bottom program dock does not display the Filer icon, and closing the software can be realized by the exit button on the menu bar.
Filer function brief introduction
The first version of Filer supports the creation of some simple documents, including
- Text document
- Markdown text
- Word
- PowerPoint
- Python document
- LaTeX document
- JSON document
- C/C++ document
- Matlab document
The default file name for document creation is untitled + document suffix. In the future, support for other documents should be added. The efficiency and time depend on whether the laboratory is busy or not.
Software download
Filer can be downloaded from the Mac App Store, with no payment, no ads. You are welcome to download and use it. If this app is useful for you, please leave five stars and send your feedback on Mac App Store.
