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With It for Mac
Introduction With It is a contextual menu plug-in for the Finder that adds the ability to open a document using an application other than the one that created the document. In addition, documents and folders can be handed off to applications for processing, such as DropStuff for compression or BatChmod for changing permissions. Once you have installed the plug-in by using the Installer application, from within the Finder you can hold down the control key while clicking on one or more selected items and the plug-in will add an additional menu item ("Process With") to the contextual menu.  Features With It will automatically remember what your favorite applications are for different types of items. After the first time you process a document or folder (or both) using With It, on subsequent displays of the contextual menu, the "Process With" menu item will change into a hierarchical menu, listing what your favorite applications are to process the current type of selection. In addition, if the "Always show Best applications" option is enabled, the menu will also list applications which can directly process the selected item. Finally, via the "Other" menu item, you're able to pick an application which isn't listed in the menu.  The "Show" pop up menu can be used to display additional applications in the application list.  Show Best - Only shows Mac OS X applications which can directly process the selected item. If the application name has an asterisk (*) after it, that means that it's a Classic application. Selecting this application will cause Mac OS X to first start up the Classic environment if it's not already running. Show More and Show All will also display additional information about the applications, including the application's version number and its path (or location) on your hard disk. How It Works When the "Process With" contextual menu item is selected, it opens a dialog that lets you select from a list of applications which can process the selected items. What applications are visible depends upon what types of items are selected and the current "Show" pop up menu setting. For example, the list of available applications for a single JPEG document will be different from the list for a single folder, and may be different again when both documents and folders are selected. The first time With It is used it will search your computer's hard disks looking for application related information. Specifically, With It searches the local and current user Applications folders, including those inside any Developer folders. Optionally, it can also search the "Application (Mac OS 9)" folder. All this information is then stored in the With It preferences folder located in your computer's Preferences folder. With It uses this information to determine which applications can open the currently selected documents. Any time With It determines that one of those folders have changed, it re-searches for applications in that particular folder. Preferences  Use the Options dialog to configure the number of favorite applications you want displayed in the Finder's contextual menu. You can clear this history of favorite applications by pressing the "Clear Favorites" button. Enabling the "Always show Best applications" option will also list applications in the Finder's contextual menu which can directly process the selected item. The "Search Application (Mac OS 9) folder" check box is off by default, since normally that folder contains a large number of Classic applications which will not run natively on Mac OS X. In addition, searching this folder takes additional time and will cause a noticeable delay when opening the With It dialog. Uninstalling To remove With It, search for "With It.plugin" using the Finder. Once found, drag the item to the Trash. You may need to Restart or Log Out to complete the removal. |
