Black Diamond Products has released the first public beta of its new file manipulation tool Bopalong for Macintosh. The file manipulation and listing program lets you rename batches of files, batch change various file properties, and generate file and folder listings.
Bopalong allows previews of any file changes before making them and has simple wildcard renaming facilities, according to MacTech magazine. With it, you can set file labels, comments, type and creator codes. The US$10 shareware application allows you to delete resource forks, which can be useful for Web graphics. Bopalong has flexible file selection facilities, lets you view or export file listings with selectable fields and separators, and features a folder size lister to help see where all that disk space is going. What’s more, you can use the “file fiddler” to generate lists based on various search criteria.
The motivation for writing Bopalong was to pull together in one program much of the functionality of other utilities, and to add more in the way of folder list generating capabilities, according to its author, Peter Job. Coming from a background of other operating systems, he said he had always been surprised at how difficult it is on the Mac to generate folder information in a usable format. The Mac OS shields one from so many things, that is one of its great strengths, Jobs said. However, sometimes you really want to see things a bit more clearly, to do bulk operations on files, to find out easily what is hogging your disk space, etc., he added.
You can get more or download a trial version at the Bopalong Web site. System requirements are a Mac running Mac OS 8.6 or later, 9 MB of free RAM, 3 MB of available hard disk space, and a screen set to 1024×768 minimum for the best results. Also, since Bopalong has a picture preview facility that requires that there be enough memory to load the picture that you have selected to preview, you may need to increase Bopalong’s RAM allocation if you intend previewing large pictures.
Black Diamond Products other products include: FileFone, a peer-to-peer “phone” for sending files for Macs and PCs; WebiToome, a cross platform app for receiving files via your Web page for Mac and PC; SockeToome, a peer-to-peer private transfer tool; Monica, a Mac download manager; Hefty FTP, a Mac FTP client; NewsFinder, an application for Macs and PCs for finding open NNTP servers; and Sgt. Zondi, a personal Web search spider.