Nosce te ipsum

Over time we all develop our ways of getting certain tasks done on the computer and once those behaviors have been ingrained to the point where they become a habit, they can be awfully difficult to change. Similar to teaching an old dog new tricks, I absolutely hate it when I find that I have a way of doing something that while it may technically work, it's far from efficient and even if I know there is a better approach out there, I somehow convince myself that it is more trouble than its worth to learn the new approach and thus settle with the old way.

After hearing Chuck Joiner over at the MUG Center talk about his fondness for a little application called Default Folder X, I decided to give a real try to see if it might be useful to me. The issue that I'd like to resolve with the help of Default Folder X is the fact that I tend to work in deeply nested folders all day long and saving and opening a file gets to be a fairly time consuming process. Default Folder is designed to make it easier for you to be able to get to the places that you use on a frequent basis, thus saving you the trouble of near-constant clicking to get to your destination folder.

From their website:

For years, Default Folder has helped speed Macintosh users through the process of opening, saving, and managing files. Even in Mac OS X, the familiar Open and Save dialogs are missing some very necessary features, and have some decidedly inconvenient quirks. Default Folder X fixes a number of problems in OS X's file dialogs and adds convenient features to quickly get you where you want to go.

After playing with it for 30 minutes, the application seems to be a clever bit of programming which includes some very interesting components making it easier to handle common day to day file tasks such as renaming and moving files. Taking a moment to setup your favorites will definitely save you time down the road. If you have any need to speed up the way in which you open and save files on your Mac, give this application a look. While my experience with it is, at this point, minimal - I like what I see and it's creators have been around the Mac block a time or two which is exactly the kind of independent developers that I personally like to support. It's folks like these that really do make the Mac what it is.