Even with the arrival of Lion and its LaunchPad app and other goodies, Yellow Lemon Software’s FolderGlance (http://www.scsc.no/products/folderglance/), a utility for browsing files and folders, is still a sweet addition to your Mac’s software arsenal.

The app lets you preview files directly from the contextual menus, as well as move, copy and make aliases of selected files at locations you browse to.
For example, its Hover Previews feature lets you automatically preview files while browsing the context menu created by FolderGlance. By allowing the mouse cursor to linger over a file shown in one of FolderGlance’s context menus for a short period of time (more on that in a moment), a preview automatically appears on-screen. This new preview-mode lets you quickly browse a pictures, documents and other files without using your keyboard.

Unless you only use your Mac sporadically, FolderGlance can certainly speed up your workflow. Moving a file, copying it to a new location takes less time than it would without this app. One irritant: though you can move and copy files right from the contextual menu, the menu doesn’t appear until you let go of the button — and there’s no feedback to let you know when you’ve held the button down long enough.

The latest version adds a menu extra for access to files and folders from your menubar, and context-sensitive script support. And it adds Lion support.

FolderGlance is Universal Binary so runs natively on both PowerPC and Intel Macs. It requires Mac OS X 10.6 (“Snow Leopard”) or higher. FolderGlance costs US$20 for new users.

Rating: 8 out of 10

–Dennis Sellers