Name Mangler 2.5.1 is out, available for direct customers via in-app updating (or by downloading the full version from our site), and for App Store customers via the Updates tab in the App Store application.

There’s only one change in this version, but it’s an important one. If a rename operation will remove the extension from one (or more) filenames, then Name Mangler will ask you to confirm that this is what you really want to do.

In older versions of Mac OS X (and the Mac OS in general), the loss of an extension wasn’t a big deal—the system didn’t rely on extensions to determine which program should open a given file. Now, however, extensions are quite important; remove the extension from a PNG file, for instance, and OS X will probably think that file is now a Unix Executable file. It’s important to note that the file itself hasn’t been damaged; if you put the extension back, it will work as it did before.

Given OS X’s relatively new reliance on extensions, we felt it important that Name Mangler ask you to reconfirm your intent to remove filename extensions before doing so.

Name Mangler 3 includes date-based renaming features outside of Advanced mode; this article will be of interest only to those running Name Mangler 2.

Name Mangler is our user-friendly yet powerful batch file renamer. In this how-to, I’ll show you how to use Name Mangler’s Advanced mode to add date and/or timestamps to your filenames (and how to replace a portion of the filename, all in one pass).

While Advanced mode can be intimidating, the objective of this tutorial is to show you that it may not be as bad as you fear, and that you can do quite a lot with it. To get the most out of this tutorial, I recommend you create a batch of sample files, and follow along in Name Mangler, trying each step as you read.

Name Mangler’s Help file contains an entire section on Advanced mode, covering all the commands available; if you have the display space, opening the Help window alongside the tutorial and Name Mangler could be very useful.

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Name Mangler 2.4.6 has two new features and one bug fix. For users of Advanced mode, you can now use increment and decrement to do math-based renaming. Details on both commands can be found in the help file.

For users who work with hidden files, we’ve added a hidden pref (logical, right?) to enable you to create names that start with a period (which are hidden by the OS X Finder). You’ll find the command in the full Name Mangler release notes page.

Direct purchasers can get the update via in-app updating, or by downloading the full version from our web site. App Store purchasers should (shortly) see the update available in the App Store application.

We’ve just released a minor update to Name Mangler that includes only a couple of changes:

• A new optional parameter (sequence identifier) has been added to Advanced mode’s Sequential Numbering function. If this sequence identifier is included, it indicates that sequence indexes are only inferred from the number of files that share the same identifier, as opposed to the overall number of files to be renamed.
• Optimized the progress bar’s display when renaming thousands of files.

As always, direct customers can get the update via in-app updates (or by downloading the new version from our site). App Store customers should see the update available either now or very soon via the App Store program.