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.

We’ve just released Name Mangler 2.4.4, which contains an important fix for an issue introduced in yesterday’s 2.4.3 update: under certain conditions, renaming wouldn’t actually work, despite the filename preview showing correctly within Name Mangler. Version 2.4.4 fixes this problem, and that’s the only change in this release.

If you bought Name Mangler directly from us, the update has been released, and you can get it via in-app updating or by downloading Name Mangler again from our site. We apologize for two releases in two days, but we felt it was important to get this fix out as soon as possible.

If you’re using the App Store version, we’ve submitted 2.4.4 for approval, which we hope will take only a few days. If you find that version 2.4.3 won’t work for a certain renaming task, you can (temporarily) use the demo version from our site until the App Store update is approved. Continue reading to see how to do that.

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It’s only fitting that, on today’s one-year anniversary of the company’s relaunch, Name Mangler receives an update: Name Mangler was the first product updated on our relaunched site back in March of 2010. One year later, version 2.4.2 adds one very useful feature, and one bug fix.

The very useful feature is that Name Mangler’s text fields will now auto-expand to show text that overflows the available display space. So if you’ve got a long text entry in a field, you won’t have to use the cursor keys to scroll through its contents (or, even worse, miss the fact that there’s more text there at all). Instead, the field will simply expand to show all the text:

The single line Prefix is what you see in older versions of Name Mangler; the bottom Prefix is what you’ll see in Name Mangler 2.4.2. (If you don’t need the space, the text box will still take up only one line, as it does in older versions; it only grows when necessary.) Read the release notes for details on the bug fix, if you’re interested in the gory details.

Direct purchasers of Name Mangler can update via the in-app updating (or by downloading a new copy from our server); App Store customers should see the update available in the App Store any time now. (The update has been approved and released, but it may take a bit of time to propagate to the various countries’ App Stores.)