Over the past year I’ve had a steady stream of emails asking if a Fileside version 2 is coming. One even wondered whether the project is still being maintained. The short answer is yes. Fileside 2.0 is deep in development and will be the biggest upgrade yet.

After a recent flare-up of RSI-related wrist pain, I decided to make a serious attempt at becoming proficient at speech computing. My hope was to be able to add an alternative input method in order to offload my hands, and allow them some rest even during my daily work. I’m now four weeks in and this post summarises my impressions. The journey has had its fair share of frustrations, but also brought some surprising insights.

Just another maintenance release with a few fixes for newly reported bugs.

Fixes a crash on Windows when navigating up from the top level of a drive to This PC. This is a Windows-only release.

Fixes a few bugs around saving of shortcuts, and handling of non-English characters when searching. Improvements include new shortcuts for toggling commonly used settings, drag-and-drop of URLs and improved type-to-jump.

This release fixes switching between apps using Alt/Cmd-Tab while dragging files out of Fileside. A few quality of life improvements made it in too, like drag-and-drop to path breadcrumbs, and opening a folder in a new pane via middle click.

Several bug fixes, including a devious one that could make other apps on the Mac hang after copying a file in Fileside.

Fixes an unfortunate crash bug that slipped into 1.9.0.

Symlinks, junctions, shortcuts, aliases… They kinda worked. Some of them. Some of the time. Depending on what you did. But they never got the love they deserved. 1.9 crosses the t’s and dots the i’s to make sure all varieties of links are treated as first-class citizens.

A quick search for “Full Disk Access” reveals plenty of results, although some are misleading if not outright dishonest. Many come from application vendors suggesting that if we don’t grant their Mac apps Full Disk Access, they might not work as intended. In fact, the vast majority of applications should have no reason to need Full Disk Access.