After a long and intense development period, Name Mangler 3 is now available, either directly from our site or from the App Store (yes, it’s sandboxed). This release is loaded with tons of new features, an updated user interface, and some incredible increases in renaming speed.

The regular price for Name Mangler 3 is $19, but it’s on sale for an astonishing $10 for the next seven days as an introductory special. (Name Mangler 2 users who purchased directly from us can upgrade for $9 for the next 30 days, after which the upgrade price will become $14.)

For a video overview of Name Mangler 3, check out the overview video (also available in ogv and webm formats).

While designing Name Mangler 3, we had four objectives in mind: Safe, Fast, Complete, and Easy. After many months of effort, and lots of great feedback from our beta test team, Name Mangler 3 delivers on all four of these objectives. Keep reading to see just how we’ve added features, improved performance, and revised the user interface to achieve our objectives for Name Mangler 3.

Safe

Whether you’re renaming dozens or thousands of files, you want it done safely—losing files during a renaming task is simply not acceptable. That’s why Name Mangler 3 includes these features to insure safe renaming:

• Duplicate prevention: Creating duplicate filenames during a rename can lead to lost files, as one file overwrites another. That’s why, before you even start a renaming task, Name Mangler 3’s status lights and tooltip text let you know if there’s going to be a naming collision. See a red status light? Check the tooltip for the cause. Name Mangler 3 won’t allow you to rename files until you resolve the duplicate issues.

  

  Name Mangler can optionally force names to be unique, too, if you’d rather not worry about this issue at all.

• Undo mistakes: Make a mistake during your renaming? Don’t worry, Name Mangler 3 can undo the last-performed renaming action.
• Block dangerous actions: Name Mangler 3 won’t let you rename files associated with iTunes, iPhoto, and Aperture, as that can cause problems within those applications.

Name Mangler 3 also checks files’ write status before renaming, warning you if you don’t have write permission. If your renaming action will remove any filename extensions, you’ll be asked to confirm before proceeding—files without extensions in OS X can be problematic.

The safety features in Name Mangler 3 let you rename your files with confidence, as they provide a safety net you need to help insure nothing is lost in the process. (Of course, you should always have a backup whenever you’re doing anything of a massive scale to your filesystem!)

Fast

A super-safe renaming app isn’t much use if it’s slower than a large fruit-named computer company is at releasing new versions of its flagship desktop hardware…but I digress. When renaming thousands—or even tens of thousands—of files, speed is of the essence.

That’s why we’ve optimized Name Mangler 3 to deliver speeds like you’ve never seen before. Depending on your computer, hard drive, renaming configuration, and other such variables, Name Mangler 3 can be anywhere from 50 to 100 times (or more) faster than Name Mangler 2. For example, when renaming 5,000 files, here’s how the two versions compared:

In other words, Name Mangler 3 renamed 5,000 files in just 3.3 seconds, versus 203 seconds—over three minutes—for Name Mangler 2. Name Mangler 3 even scales well for huge jobs: A test renaming of 20,000 files took just 25 seconds. If speed is what you need, Name Mangler 3 delivers, and does so without compromising safety.

Complete

What good is safety and speed if you can’t do everything you need to do? Name Mangler 3 is your one-stop multifile renaming solution. As always, a slew of renaming actions await your use: Find and Replace, Sequence, Add Prefix/Suffix, Insert/Delete, and more. Now, Name Mangler 3 adds to its existing skill set with these powerful new features:

• Metadata: Use the metadata browser to insert “data about data”—image dimensions, audio bit rate, etc.—into any renaming operation. With over 150 metadata fields available, our browser needs to be smart—and it is. As you type, it narrows the list of matching metadata fields, making it easy to find just the one you need.
• Multi-step renaming: Need to find and replace text within a bunch of filenames and add a sequence number to their names? In Name Mangler 3, you can string together one or more renaming actions to do everything you need to do in one rename operation. No longer will you need to reprocess your filenames; one pass is all it takes.
• Save presets: Have a renaming operation you use a lot? Just save it as a preset, and it’s always available. Presets can even be automatically shared across Macs using Box or Dropbox.
• Revisit history: Name Mangler 3 keeps track of every renaming action you perform. Want to re-do that action you ran three months ago, but forgot to save as a preset? No problem; use the history browser to call it up.

  

  Make any changes you desire, and your action is ready to use again.

• View interim filenames: If you’re performing a multi-step renaming operation, select any step of the operation, and Name Mangler will show you the filenames as of that step, as well as the ending filename. This makes it easy to insure that Name Mangler 3 is going to do exactly what you want it to do.
• Advanced mode advances: For those who use Name Mangler’s Advanced mode, you gain all sorts of goodies in this release: resizable edit area, auto-indent, auto-completion of functions and variables, tab to empty parameters, find and replace, and indent and outdent of multiple lines of code. You can also save snippets of code for easy reuse in the future, and share these saved snippets as you can do with saved presets.

Lots of other touches abound to offer the complete renaming experience. Retina graphics for those using retina-enabled display devices. Export renaming configurations to share with others. A new Compose rename command, so you can start with an empty name. Status lights reveal the presence of syntax errors in regular expressions. Rename files using an imported CSV-delimited text file.

Easy

Name Mangler has always been about ease of use. Filename previews show you before-and-after views of your filenames before you rename them. You can populate the file list via drag-and-drop, a Finder selection, or an Open dialog. Quick Look lets you check that the files you’re renaming are, in fact, the files you want to rename. A progress bar shows you how your renaming task is proceeding (though it’s onscreen much less often now, thanks to Name Mangler 3’s speed).

We’ve built on these great features in Name Mangler 3, taking ease of use to another level. Among the new ease of use improvements are:

• Automatic input box sizing If you’ve ever tried to work with lots of text in a small input box, you know how frustrating it can be—lots of scrolling to see everything, difficulty in selecting, etc. Name Mangler solves this problem with automatically-resizing input boxes:

  

  Type as much or as little as you like, and Name Mangler will make sure you can see what you’re doing.

• Draggable multi-step actions: When working with multi-step actions, you can change the working order by dragging each individual renaming action around. If you prefer the keyboard, Command and the Up or Down Arrow key will similarly move actions up or down the chain.
• Export configurations: If you need to share your renaming actions with others, you can easily do so by exporting the configuration file, and sending it to the other person. They can open your configuration with a double-click.
• Add files to the selection: Forget to include some files you wanted to rename? Shift-drag them from Finder into Name Mangler 3’s file area, and they’ll be added to the existing set.
• Show only affected files: Sometimes you’ll be dealing with thousands of files, only wanting to rename a few. Name Mangler 3’s new View > Show Modified Files Only menu makes this simple, by removing any files that won’t be renamed from the list of displayed files.
• Automatic view mode: Change the sort order from Name to Modification Date, and Name Mangler 3 automatically adds the Date Modified field to the file list view. Change the sort order to Size, and each file’s size is automatically displayed.

The total package

Although not everyone needs a multi-file renamer, for those who do, Name Mangler 3 delivers the goods. With safeguards that help prevent data loss, speed to crush even the most demanding of tasks, a complete set of features, and incredible ease of use, there’s not a better renamer out there.

Try the free demo today and see for yourself.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 27th, 2013 at 6:48 am by Rob Griffiths, and is filed under Company News, Name Mangler, Products. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.