We released Finder 1.1 today. We had launched Finder last week, and since then we have been overwhelmed by the response we received from the Firefox OS community. Finder got featured in online tech magazines and is currently rated 5 star on the Firefox Marketplace with 11 reviews. We intend to carry on the success, which is why we have come with a set of quick improvements to Finder.

Here is what you will find in this update.

Preview files while picking them from web activity

If you open Finder while trying to attach a file from another application (e.g., adding email attachments through web activity), you can now preview the file before picking it. The interface has been unified to give same look and feel irrespective of whether you opened Finder directly or opened it from another app.

Each search result now has a “View” button, which you can click to open a preview of the file. In web activity mode, you need to tap on the result itself to pick it. The flow is quite simple.

Finder 1.1 search from web activity

Finder 1.1 normal search

Basic search feedback

Finder will now ask you to hold for a while as it searches in the background. This was needed to remove the confusion about whether Finder was doing anything at all. As of now this is just a simple text feedback. We plan to improve on this in future, giving more realtime updates.

Finder 1.1 simple search feedback

UI fixes

Finder is on its way to perfection. We have ironed about nearly 10 small interface issues here and there, making Finder look that wee bit more polished.

Developer juice

The previous two features are intended for the end user. For developers, the big news is that we have moved to a flexbox model for the search results. In 1.2, we intend to migrate wholly to a flexbox based setup and reduce the lines of code needed to build the UI.

If you are looking to join the team behind Finder, drop in a pull request at Finder’s Github repository or you can help by contributing to FinderJS, the device storage library behind Finder!

Up next

We are secretly plotting to come up with a weekly release cycle. But nothing has been confirmed yet. All of it depends on how fast our users want new features to land in Finder.

Hope you like this new update! Let us know if you have any features in mind! And if you truly love us, drop a review for the Finder app on the Firefox Marketplace!

Resources

• Finder Github repository
• Finder 1.1 release information
• Finder app on Firefox Marketplace