Path Finder 4.0.1 review

It's taken 18 months and a few false starts, but Path Finder 4 is finally here. It's essentially a better version of Mac OS X's Finder file browser, and this latest version adds layers of functionality so you can tailor it to your working style.

It looks like OS X's File Browser. You can set it up to Icon, List or Column view, and there's a customisable Toolbar along the top where you can store regularly accessed items. Look more closely, though, and you'll see three more fields between the Browser panes and the Toolbar. The first is the Path Browser, a visual representation of the path taken to the current file or folder. Using this, you can quickly 'snap back' to any point in the path. The top field accommodates a Bookmarks Bar analogous to the one in Safari, but it's the middle field that will cause the most excitement: this is where the tabs sit. Yup, Path Finder 4 has tabbed file browsing, and it will change the way you navigate your file system. The real advantage of this is that resources for a project, which may be widely separated in the file system, can sit next to each other in the same browser window.

With today's increasingly large hard drives, searching has become more important than ever and Path Finder 4 integrates Spotlight searches, but not in the way you might expect. Instead of the steady trickle of results that change as you type in more of your search term, it waits until you've typed in the entire term and hit return. Then it calls up the main Spotlight window. This stops your entire system grinding to a halt as the Finder tries to show you every item that contains the first letter of your search item. And as Spotlight can only show you what it has already indexed, there's still the option to do a fast 'drill-down' search, as in previous versions.

Related to the Find functions is the new Select function, which you can use to search for items in a folder according to file type, title and even type and creator codes. Matching files are then selected, which make is a serious, heavyweight replacement for the file browser. You can also add to an initial selection.

Path Finder 3 users will find that things have moved around a bit. For example, the Preview pane now sits underneath the main browser window instead of in a drawer, and the complex Preferences have been rearranged with some being farmed out as menu items.

There's so much more to Path Finder 4 - Terminal access, HTML rendering, a built-in PDF viewer to name but a few. Anyone with a file system that's more than a few folders deep should download the demo version and check it out.