Filewrangler Status Report

Just wanted to give a quick status update on how things are going with filewrangler. My plans to work on a dot update we’re thrown under a bus, almost literally. I was recently struck from behind by a bus and had to go to the hospital. I’m recovering well right now, but I can’t say programming has been of such importance to me during my healing time.

Now that I’m feeling more like myself, I have given some thought about how to address certain challenges filewrangler’s unique interface poses to certain renaming needs. I’m starting to hash out how to handle the UI needs and make filewrangler even more useful and valuable to the steadily increasing user base.

I would like to point out that the Mac App Store has provided great support for the future longevity of filewrangler. My competition, one priced higher and one with less history than filewrangler, both seem to be consistently outselling filewrangler. If you enjoy the program and want to support its future growth, I humbly urge you to leave a review on your blog, on the Mac App Store, or just spread the word. I understand the interface is such that some may not want to invest in the learning curve, but I wouldn’t have built it if I didn’t truly think it represents a large, logical step forward in the tools it provides.

I hope you feel the same, and I hope that at $6.99 you find it to be of sufficient value and utility to spread a little grassroots love around the Macintosh user community, wherever your influence may lie.

4 thoughts on “Filewrangler Status Report

  1. I just purchased this app today and find the price to be more than fair. It’s a little different from the PC world where there is a freeware solution for almost anything, but after a week of being a mac user I’ve found you definitely get what you pay for.

    On the PC I was using ‘Bulk Rename Utility’, and while it’s interface was confusing at first, it had unmatched power. You could pull off some amazing renames in one pass.

    The only thing I would like to see added to filewrangler is the ability to either insert text at an arbitrary location at any point in the chain, or build a chain of builder sets to carry out multi-pass renames in one go.

    I look forward to seeing what comes next.

  2. Hey Christopher,

    First off thanks for the app, it really helped me out. I had been looking for the Mac equivalent of Lupas Rename 2000 and Filewrangler while far more limited did the trick.

    If you are looking for features to add to extend the appeal I would definitely recommend that you take a look at Lupas Rename and plunder some of its features. Specifically adding builders to crop left n / crop right n characters, and builders to assign MP3 and EXIF meta data tags as parts of the file name.

    Will be posting a positive review up on the app store. Thanks again, hope you keep developing it in the future.

  3. Hi there, sorry to hear about your recent troubles and apologies for using the comments section for something tangentially related to the post above but your contact link only allows ‘contact’ through mail which I don’t use (I use gmail and I was unable to copy/paste an email adress from the contact link). Does name file wrangler allow for alternate naming? I.e. I’ve been scanning books and I have a file with all the left hand pages and another with all the right hand pages. Would it be possible to use file wrangler to number all the Left pages as consecutive odd numbers and the right hand ones as consecutive even numbers? That way when I merge the files the ‘book’ will be ordered and all I have to do is convert to pdf. Thanks for your help.

  4. Thanks for the comment, and I’m sorry you had trouble grabbing my email address: development@christopherdrum.com

    As for your question, it would depend a little bit on how the documents are currently named. I understand what you are describing, but filewrangler does not currently allow for adding a numeric sequence of “only odd numbers” or “only even numbers”.

    That said, there may still be a way to get this done. Consider the following: the word “left” comes alphabetically before “right”. If two pages have the names
    001 – Left – Book Name.pdf
    001 – Right – Book Name.pdf
    When those two folders of files are merged and sorted alphabetically in the Finder, you would get the sort order you want, even if the document name doesn’t necessary have odd/even correct.

    So, rather than merge and sort based on that number, add an alphabetical qualifier to the sequence to force the left-right sort separation. In my above example, I used “left” and “right”, but you could number all left-hand pages as
    001a
    002a
    003a
    etc
    and all right-hand pages as
    001z
    002z
    003z
    etc
    So long as you add some arbitrary alphabetical signifier to distinguish left pages from right, I think you’d achieve what you need. Try doing it manually in the Finder to see if the theory holds up.

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