The MacHumble Bundle sponsored by 9 to 5 Mac prompted me to buy four intresting apps this year, some new to me, with others being long-time wishlist occupants:

• Screens 4.8
• Tumult Whisk
• FireTask Pro
• Filepane

Filepane was the most unusual and interesting of the bunch, so I added it to the bundle. At its core, Filepane provides an alternative interface for moving files around on your Mac. When you start to drag a file in Finder, a small window pops up; dropping the file or files onto that window brings up a palette of actions you can choose.

Filepane moves files (and folders) from one location to another, but it also:

• attaches the file to a new email
• creates a zip archive of the file or files
• sets your wallpaper
• converts and edits images
• invokes macOS’s share sheet
• copies
• gathers files into a new folder

One key limitation of Filepane in my brief experience is that the action palette appears within pixels of the file or files you were attempting to move; Filepane’s interaction with files in the lower right-hand corner of your screen will be in that same corner. On larger displays, the action palette can be difficult to see. An option for a larger palette, and potentially one in the middle or top middle of the screen, would work better for me. (You can, however, drag an activated Filepane palette to wherever you like on your screen/

If you’re using Filepane to move files around (something as an avid user of ~/Desktop for active documents and project folders, which requires frequent attention to avoid Desktop clutter, I find tedious), the item file menu hierarchy exposed in when drilling down levels is small. It’s also entirely mouse-driven, which makes sense in that dragging a file is how you invoke the application. If you prefer to keep your hands on the keyboard, though, Filepane isn’t for you.

I’m excited to try this out over a longer period of usage; whatever your final opinion of Filepane is, it is an intriguing reconsideration of a well-understood metaphor for organizaing your data. I still do a log of clicking and dragging, although my preferred way of moving files around these days is using Launchbar.

Jack Holmes, writing for Esquire:

This was all by design. His party had matched his rhetoric in the run-up to Election Day with action, as Republican legislatures in key battleground states—like Michigan and Pennsylvania—held fast to a policy, even amid the expected pandemic surge of mail ballots, that officials could not begin counting those votes until Election Day. That made it all the more likely the counting would not be done by Election Night—and that, in the days after, the president could yell that the remaining ballots were fraudulent, and dispatch his lawyers to various courts to ask Republican-appointed judges to throw them out.

The President Is Focusing His Towering and Shameless Mendacity on One Last Job

Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin of the NY _Times_:

Much of the uncertainty hanging over the election arose from the inconsistent or patchwork array of state-level policies hurriedly put in place to enable voting amid a public health disaster. In a number of states, like Pennsylvania and Michigan, local Republican officials blocked Democrats’ efforts to make it easier to count ballots cast before Election Day, raising the possibility of a drawn-out count in some of the most important battlegrounds — the very occurrence Mr. Trump protested Wednesday morning.

As America Awaits a Winner, Trump Falsely Claims He Prevailed

The administration didn’t just object to counting ballots past Election Day, it worked to require that districts couldn’t begin counting them until then. Talk about squeezing from both ends.

My Logitech Bluetooth mouse was notably flakey yesterday, not working worth a damn after sitting idle for even a few seconds. I poked around online and found that turning off Handshake can make the problems go away:

If your Mac’s Bluetooth connectivity to peripherals is flakey, it’s worth a try, only takes a few seconds, and doesn’t require any tinkering or messing around with system files. Simply open up your System Preferences, select General, look for a setting called Allow Handoff between this Mac and your iCloud devices and make sure it’s un-checked.

This Trick May Solve Your Mac Bluetooth Connectivity Issues