Commander One is what you would call a Finder Enhancement app. It simply recreates Finder windows and adds a multitude of tweaks and features to them. This is nothing new; XtraFinder does this to some extent, and and Path Finder have done these things for years. But Commander One promises to offer Path Finder-level features, plus a built-in FTP manager, at an affordable price through the Mac App Store—where you have the luxury of installing it on five Macs at a time.

Features

The biggest feature of Commander One is the built-in FTP file manager. The need for an FTP Manager today is rather limited. In fact, other than web developers, I suspect there are few people who need FTP anymore, or even know what it is. But if you do need it, the concept of having FTP built-in to Finder windows is certainly enticing.

Along with it’s marquee FTP feature, Commander One offers the ability to theme it’s file manager window, access a Processes window (similar to Apple’s own Activity Monitor), a built-in Terminal, various file sorting capabilities, integration with Dropbox and more.

I won’t go into all the features, you can read about them on the website. I gave Commander One a test run for the last two weeks and compiled my thoughts below.

Unfortunately, none of the features found in Commander One work as well as they do in other apps. In my opinion, the entire app feels cobbled together and lacking in polish. For instance, simply hitting the Space bar in Commander One doesn’t invoke Quick Look like it does in the Finder. You actually have to click a button in the toolbar. An app that exists to replace the Finder needs to improve the Finder, not remove great features.

For simple tasks like dual-pane Finder windows, adding global hotkeys, adding legacy-style Finder labels, theming Finder windows, adding a button to view invisible files, auto-resize windows to specific sizes (or just enough to fit file names on the fly) and adding a host of other tweaks and enhancements to the Mac’s standard Finder, I use the excellent XtraFinder app, which has the benefit of being free; though it does require disabling Apple’s SIP (System Integrity Protection) to do so; a problem that brought about headaches for many software developers with the arrival of El Capitan, and ultimately killed the popular Total Finder, a Commander One competitor.

Commander One’s hero feature, an integrated FTP manager, sounds like the one feature that would make Commander One worth paying for. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the FTP management feature to work with my FTP sites at all. Eltima offered to troubleshoot the problem for me, but I didn’t go through with it because FTP is such a basic thing that I shouldn’t have to—it’s an ftp address, a username and a password. I have two other FTP apps installed, and both work flawlessly with my FTP sites.

Mac Finder integration is key

And that’s really the problem here. Commander One is a separate app that doesn’t integrate with the Finder, or replace it. So launching an app like CyberDuck or Transmit to use FTP services is no different than using Commander One exclusively, really. Almost all of Commander One’s features suffer from this same problem.

If you’re looking to completely replace the Finder, I think Path Finder does a much better job. Unlike Commander One, Path Finder offers a way to completely ‘replace’ the Finder in almost every meaningful way. If you don’t mind using a separate app for adding useful features to a Finder-like environment, ForkLift looks much better, and offers virtually the same feature set., including FTP file management.

If you just want to add some cool and useful features to the existing Finder, I think you’ll find XtraFinder to be an excellent choice.

The basic features of Commander One are free, with the pro features costing $30. Unfortunately, some of the pro features are available with fee apps like XtraFinder, some are already built-in to the Finder, and others are only useful to those with specific use cases.

Ultimately, though, I’m not sure any app can ‘replace’ the Mac’s Finder completely. Running a completely separate Finder-replacement app on top of the Finder seems pointless to me to begin with. As a huge fan of some of Eltima’s other software like Airy, I was disappointed with Commander One. But Commander One does an admirable job for what it is, and I know that there are those that will find the features Commander One offers to be useful. It’s just not for me.

Suspicious Package is a Quick Look plugin that shows you what’s being installed and where, including scripts that will be run, and where the files will be placed. It’s free, and doesn’t even require a restart.

El Capitan is here. Servers will likely be running slow most of the day, so perhaps spend the afternoon backing up your Mac before updating. Or, you can read the obscenely thorough Ars Technica review of El Capitan.

If you use Mac OS X’s built-in speech service to read text back to you, you’re going to love this little gem!

Dictator is a free add-on that enhances built-in speech services by adding a progress indicator, a teleprompter (for reading along with the audio if you wish), and control audio with play, pause, and skip forward by sentence or paragraph controls.

To use Dictator, you simply select some text in any Services supported app (pretty much every app), right-click and choose Dictate from the menu.

You can download Dictater here.

Stuart Hall offers an interesting look at the colors of app icons on iOS and the Mac in this article. Blue, by far, is the most popular color; but if you want to stand out from the crowd, purple is probably the coolest color to go with! I’m actually surprised at how few apps use the pink/purple hues.

Itsycal is a tiny calendar for your Mac’s menu bar. It adds one function that has been missing on the Mac from day one, and one that has driven me crazy for years.

Itsycal will display a monthly calendar, as well as your calendar events from the Mac Calendar app. Events are highlighted on the calendar, and you can also create and delete (but not edit) events.

Itsycal is a lightweight app and is free of charge.

After tinkering, I realized that El Capitan has added an option in the Display preferences that allows your Mac to automatically adjust the display based on ambient light. Turning this option off (unchecking) fixed my screen brightness issue.

Because this is an iMac, in an office where I control the lighting, this is probably optimal. However, I haven’t installed the beta on my MacBook Pro, so I’m not sure if the new feature offers benefits to mobile users.

CleverFiles has a fairly new app for Mac OS X that can help you analyze your storage drive and remove large files and folders easily. Disk Cartography maps your drive data and lists the space-hogging files in an easy-to-read list, and allows you to delete the unwanted files/folders with the click of a button.

Upon launching Disk Cartography, it scans your chosen disk and displays a tree-like folder-structure which you can use to evaluate what’s taking up space, as well as where it is on your drive.

You can manually or automatically filter what is shown by setting parameters such as minimum file size, or whether or not to show System files, etc. The minimum file size feature is particularly useful because it allows you to view your file folder list without the thousands of files taking up so little space that it’s not worth seeing. You can see an example in the image above. Those “Filtered Objects” folders contain all the files on my drive that don’t meet my minimum filter requirements of a minimum of 128MB in size.

Scanning my drive took only a few minutes, and the app displays the data in a clear and simple interface. I also liked that I can right-click on a file or folder to ‘show it in the Finder.’

Disk Cartography isn’t the only app out there that does this, and it certainly doesn’t have the most luscious user interface of them. But I like the simplicity of the app.

There is no dedicated web page for Disk Cartography as of this writing, but you can buy it directly from the Mac App Store here.

You can grab your copy for $1.99 until May 18th when the promo ends.

Animated GIFs for your Mac, the web and your iPhone. Personally, I can’t live without GIPHY!

I’ve written about Airy in the past. Eltima Software has upgraded their awesome little YouTube video downloader to 2.0, and brought with it a few handy features.

Airy 2.0 continues to make downloading YouTube videos even easier by adding the ability to download an entire YouTube playlist with a single click. I was able to download several playlists of music videos numbering from 15 to 40 videos with no problem at all. Downloading is the same as previous versions: you paste a YouTube video address into the Airy app URL bar, or use the included browser bookmarklet (my preferred method).

The update also adds the ability to pause downloads, so the next time you open Airy, the downloads resume automatically. Given that Airy downloads videos so quickly, this may seem unnecessary, but when you consider downloading a playlist with dozens upon dozens of videos, it can come in handy.

Airy hasn’t added any new formats that I can see. But you can already save videos as MP4, FLV and 3GP formats, as well as save only the audio as an MP3, so I see little room for improvement here anyway.

Airy 2.0 is a little faster, and a little more stable—though I never had problems with the older version to begin with. This is one of those little gems that I’m glad I have around. For years there have been plenty of YouTube video downloaders that were a pain to use, and usually stopped working after a few months. Airy has been around for a while, is not free, and is provided by a stable developer. That means it’s likely to be supported for the foreseeable future.

The latest upgrade runs on Mac OS X 10.7 and later. Previous Airy users can upgrade to the new version for 50% off, and new users can use the coupon code THGM-DSC at checkout time to receive 30% off the regular $19.95 price.