One little app that I couldn’t live without is FileBox Extender for Windows. Fellow Go Media designer @Adam_Wagner originally introduced it to me last year. It’s a free, lightweight app for Windows that I use to quickly access frequently used directories.

The description on their site says:

FileBox enhances Windows by adding several advanced functions to the standard Open File and Save File dialog boxes. (Note that if a program uses its own “private” dialog boxes for these functions, you won’t see our FileBox buttons, sorry.)

So for instance, if I’m always going into our Vector Packs folder while working on a project, it can get tedious having to navigate through all of Go Media’s folder structures on our server. And when I’ve had some coffee, my mouse clicking is a little erratic and often find myself glazing over as I scan the hundreds of folders in our client directory.

Another quick tip is to simply start typing the first few letters of the folder you’re looking for and it should snap you right to it. I’ve watched people hunt and hunt for folders for at least 10-20 seconds of “dead air” time and it’s painful to watch.

One annoying thing with FileBox is that it doesn’t really work well when saving attachments from Outlook. I will go to save some attachment from my email, and use FileBox to select a favorite folder and *poof* my window disappears as it immediately saved it right to the first folder I selected with FileBox. That is mostly just an annoyance with Outlook though, as it’s the only program that seems to have problems with it.

FileBox is cool, but maybe there is something out there that does the same thing but better?