Refresh Finder Plug-in AppleScript

I find there are plenty of annoyances with Finder, which is the very limited file browser that comes with OS X. I have already mentioned the bug about changing the colour of the background in a previous post. There are far more usability issues I have with Finder that I ever had with Windows Explorer (or File Manager).

One issue that I have contended with recently was finding "Refresh", the equivalent to Windows F5. I had software generating output and was watching in Finder to see how large the output file was over time. You can Ctrl-Click and select "Get Info" but the one tap function key for refresh does not seem to be available.

After some browsing I found a nice script offered by Eric "Heavyboots" which I reproduce below. His suggestion was to save as an executable apple script app, but I have gone one further and placed the script directly into an Automator plug-in.

Automator > Library(Automator) > Action(Run AppleScript)

tell application "Finder"
 tell front window
  update every item with necessity
 end tell
end tell

File > Save As Plugin >
Save Plug-in As: Refresh
Plug-in for: Finder

Now when you want to refresh in finder you can right click (Ctrl+Click) anywhere (so far as I have tested) in Finder:
Finder > Right Click > Automator > Refresh

Path Finder has solved nearly all of these problems, however it is quite crashy on my system; so much so that it is really cheesing me off to the point where I often just use the basic OS X finder because I need something to work right away. Consequently, when I had a refresh issue with Finder ... I considered using Path Finder only for a second or two before I decided to continue with Finder. Path Finder has its own list of bugs but the added functionality is excellent. Once they iron out the crashing, and get some of the silly errors out of the software I will highly recommend Path Finder as a complete replacement for finder. But definitely not now (July 2006).