Useful for confirming checksums: works on any data file yet not apps and folders
You can open any data file via a right click open with… “File Info Professional” and it will show a window in the app with (you can see the screenshot provided):
- The File’s Size, Creation and Modification Dates, owning user name and group name, this is the same as you would get with Finder’s file info.
- Four checksums: SHA1, SHA256, MD2, MD5. These are what I needed most as I got tired of using md5sum and sha256sum. However MD2 seems to spin forever on something like a 4.2GB iso file. Well okay how about it spins for 8 minutes (while I wrote this).
- A HEX Dump view with lines of offset, 16 HEX pairs, and 16 ASCII representations of those (with . for non-visible characters or >127 || >= 0x80 || <32 || <0x20)
This HEX Dump view is interesting, it can be scrolled with the scroll wheel or swipe action, paged down and up, responds to home and end… you can click any line to select the whole line, drag over lines to select multiples, command click to select multiple discrete lines, shift click to expand or contract the last selection to contiguous lines. The arrow keys move diselect all and highlight the row above or below the last selected row. These keys also modify the other movement keys or the mouse actions. I suppose this is a built in NS view put to good use, but it’s much appreciated.
Selections can be copied out. You cannot paste in nor modify the file.
The only downsides are:
- The open with action will not be an option for folders or apps; however the service to open this in File Info Professional is always available, and using that on a folder or app will open the program but confusingly do nothing more and not show anything, not even a little explanation that folders and apps (which are kind of folders…) are not supported.
- No highlight (on mouse over maybe) of the HEX pair’s associated ASCII within a row (if you’re having trouble counting with your eyes).
- A first use “more apps by us, follow us on twitter etc” spash screen. (hey it’s free, and unobtrusive so far)
- A request to rate/review this app if you liked it, or contact support if you didn’t after the first closed window.
- It could probably be more compact than 3mb without those… but then again, that’s considered small these days.
The utility and focused featureset outwieghs these minor detractions.
Significantly: I have not yet experienced it associating itself with a file type I didn’t expect it to. It’s Info.plist in the app bundle is some 87,176 lines long of mostly viewable document type extensions like r00 through r99 or an[a-z0-9].
Below is a sample copied out of a HEX dump view of a pdf, copying the first, second and seventh lines in one discrete selection.
00000 25 50 44 46 2D 31 2E 33 0A 25 C4 E5 F2 E5 EB A7 %PDF-1.3.%......
00010 F3 A0 D0 C4 C6 0A 36 20 30 20 6F 62 6A 0A 3C 3C ......6 0 obj.<<
00060 E8 8B CA DA 6B E6 09 04 9A 14 69 24 44 01 4D 2D ....k.....i$D.M-
4rk about File Info Professional
