Name Mangler - 2.0

I have tried most of the renaming apps available. Without a doubt Name Mangler does the job, does it well and quickly. Thanks to the developers for making it available as donation ware. If I continue to use it without problems a donation will be forthcoming. I highly recommend this little application. Excellent.

Can't view app's GUI. Activity Monitor shows that app is present. App icon shows in Dock. After I read a positive review in May '08 issue of Macworld, I downloaded freeware app to try. Would be worth paying for if I could get app to work. Have killed and restarted app many times. Haven't rebooted (out of principle) yet. Uninstalled app (w/ CleanApp) and then reinstalled a newly downloaded .dmg from developer's Website. Still no luck w/ GUI appearing. I'll give it one more try whenever I reboot the next time. Using Leopard 10.5.1 on PPC.

I tried many batch file renamers, and I found three that were capable of renaming files as they appear in the Finder: File List, Renamer4Mac, and File Sequencer. A common problem is that, instead of sorting files as (1, 2, 3...), they sort them as (1, 10, 2...). All of renamers were excellent applications, but I find myself using File List almost exclusively. It has a powerful feature set, a dazzlingly simple GUI, and it's secret weapon is the ability to create "droplets," essentially renaming configurations as proxy icons activated by drag 'n' drop action.

The renamers I evaluated were both shareware and freeware, and I found no correlation between price and quality. Pricey renamers are typically bloated, often slow, and no better than File List, which is donation-ware. If you're like me you'll be happy to donate to such a talented developer as Peter Maurer (I also recommend checking out his other products, like Butler and Service Scrubber).

File List is close to perfect. The only issue I've encountered is that its window tends to get lost, and the only way to find it is to use either Expose or click on it's icon. The problem is that File List runs with no dock icon, but to be able to locate it, you've got to park its icon in the dock anyways. Expose is usually fine, but it's good GUI practice to enable several methods for finding an app. An easy fix would be to add preferences for a dock icon, and for window behavior (float on top or normal).

Thanks for such a fine app.

Fast. Easy. Simple, and yet it always seems to have a way to do any crazy renaming job I ever need to do. Truly excellent UI makes it fun to use. Ok, I'm gushing too much, but the fact that File List is free makes it an easy choice. This is the kind of app where you just pray that the author will keep up with every OS X (or OS 11) update, so it keeps on working for years and years.

Works fine and does exactly what it says on the tin !
fast and simple
thanks :-)