Talk about Turnaround... Filer Beta 2 is Out

Today sure has been busy, but in a good way. I spent last night and this morning putting together a new bed frame for my daughter (some assembly required... yeah, sure), so I was a little surprised that some people found a serious crash bug and that I my efforts were mentioned on BeOSNews. Consider me flattered. :-) After attempting to come up with some other neat uses for the Filer, I thought of a couple more features to add, started hacking away, and even found and fixed a couple more bugs. Beta 2 is out on BeBits and Haikuware.

The second beta adds some niceties that I thought would be really useful. If you send the Filer a symlink, it treats the link as if the real file were sent to it from the link's location. In other words, if I have a link to a file on the Desktop and I send the link to the Filer, it treats the file as if it really were on the Desktop. The Open command fires up the file's default application, and you could set up a simplistic form of backups with the Add to Archive command. One thing that I thought would be really useful (alas, wput doesn't exist for R5 :( ) would be to have the Filer automagically turn one of my project development folders into a zipfile and upload it to my old website. It certainly would make releases a little faster. I also added the %FOLDER% substitution pattern. Sometimes you want the folder a file is in and not the file itself. :)

It's kind of all a blur at the moment, but if I remember correctly, someone asked me how exactly you could use it to organize your MP3s for you when used with id3attr. Here's a rule to do it all:

Name ends with .mp3
Terminal command: id3attr '%FULLPATH%'
Rename it to: %ATTR:Audio:Artist% - %ATTR:Audio:Title%.mp3
Move it to: /boot/home/music/%ATTR:Audio:Artist%

Note that the %FULLPATH% section in the Terminal command has single quotes around it. This makes sure that things like spaces don't mess things up. If you also wanted to play it after it was sorted away, add an 'Open it' action at the end.

All in all, not bad for a day's work. TTFN :)