NuFile: Freeware adds contextual menu for creating new files
Originally downloaded 2/19/06. MacWorld recently reviewed this freebie, and I thought I’d give the whole “new file” notion another try. Last time, MacWorld had recommended Document Pallette, which does pretty much the same thing as Nufile, but not from a contextual menu. At the time, I couldn’t see myself needing such a thing. But since I live in contextual menus, I thought this might come in handy… we’ll see. It also adds a preference pane where you can manage the types of files you can make, and associate them with a default app.
Update 12/17/06. Still cleaning up my “download demo” entries from earlier in the year, here’s one that I thought I’d already officially made part of my toolbox. NuFile is definitely a useful add-on to Mac OS X, although I have to admit I hardly ever use it myself. On those rare occasions that I’ve needed to create a new file of some kind in a Finder folder, though, I was glad I found “New File” in my contextual menu.
NuFile adds a preference pane to System Preferences, which you can use to customize the way its contextual menu works. By dragging an application to the NuFile preferences pane, you create an entry in its list of new files you might want to create. (You can also click on the + to browse to the app you want to manage your new file type.) The preferences list also lets you define a default name for the new file, including the extension, and the wording of the context menu for that file type. Finally, you can enable or disable each file type, and specify whether the file will be opened immediately by the specified app or not.
Version 2.0 of NuFile, just released last month, adds a very useful touch to the menu… namely, the menu now displays the icon of the application that’s going to open the new file you create. This is particularly useful if you, like me, change your default application for a given type of file now and then.
NuFile works great and is relatively inconspicuous. It adds a file to your “/Library/PreferencePanes” and “/Library/Contextual Menu Items” folders. I think users who move to the Mac from Windows may find NuFile more useful than long-time Mac users, since making files instead of opening a given application is more common on that platform. Most of the time, I just launch the application I want to make a new file in, and usually the app launches with the new file all by itself. But as I said, having the flexibility to do it both ways can come in handy now and then, especially since NuFile is free.
The only weakness of NuFile worth mentioning is its use of a preference pane window. Since you can’t by default resize windows in System Preferences, there’s no way to widen the table in which you add your new file specs. This can be a problem when you can’t see the long file path defined for a given app and have to select and drag that field around to see what’s in it. The developer might be able to help by making the columns themselves resizable, but they aren’t at the moment. This would only be a temporary fix, though, since you’d have to shrink the Path column back down to size in order to read contents of other columns.
Version as tested: 2.0.
