Rorohiko’s Soxy allows you to designate files to open in a specific version of an application. On a daily basis, Soxy can preserve your sanity by saving you many needless clicks. Once in a while, it can also save your bacon by preventing you from accidentally opening and saving a client’s files in the wrong version of an application, thereby making those files unusable to the client.
For example, say a client uses InDesign CS5 and sends you a CS5 document to work on. You, being the up to date kind of person you are, just installed InDesign CS6. Double-clicking the client’s file can cause it to open in CS6 on your machine. If you’re paying attention, you might notice that the document opened with [Converted] in its title. Or you might not. If you then you work on it, save it, and send it back to the client, you can probably expect an unpleasant phone call or email later on when the client can’t open your file.
Soxy can prevent that unpleasantness. With Soxy installed, you can designate which version of InDesign opens each compatible file. So you can tell it to always open CS5 files with CS5, or to ask you which version to use when you double click a file.
Likewise, you can tell it what to do with file formats that aren’t version specific, and can be opened by several applications, things Like JPEGs. That way, you can decide if you just want a quick peek in Preview, or to open the file in Photoshop for editing.
Soxy works with files from Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, and Quark XPress, as well as PDFs, JavaScript files, and common image formats like GIF, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, and EPS.
A few bonus Soxy tips:
- Soxy works well with Bridge as long as you set your File Association preferences in Bridge correctly (appointing Soxy as the app instead of the native apps).
- Soxy can differentiate EPS files (Illustrator EPS vs. Photoshop EPS).
- With Soxy, you can make InDesign JavaScripts (.jsx files) execute on double-click without needing to put them in the Scripts folder.
You can download a free 20-day trial version of Soxy from Rorohiko.com. For large accounts (over 100 users) special version/site licenses are available.
This article was last modified on January 6, 2023
This article was first published on May 25, 2012
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