I figured I’d start a new category here called Mac Nuggets. Here is where I’ll feature wonderfully small and useful Macintosh shareware/freeware programs. I will mostly post about programs I already use and will, if time permits, add my thoughts about the usefulness of the programs I mention.
So, to start off…
Hazel 2 is a great little program (installed into the System Preferences) that automates cleaning up and putting away all those loose files you have scattered around your desktop. And it’s not only for the desktop. You can program Hazel to keep an eye out on any folder and, based on rules you create (monitoring various criteria, such as a files creation date, type, contents, etc.) it will act on those rules. So, you can program Hazel to watch your desktop and every time it senses a jpeg file being saved there, can move that jpeg to your pictures folder and import it into iPhoto at the same time. All automagically. It can even look inside a file (like a .doc or .pdf) for specific words and act on rules created to deal with those words. This just scratches the surface as to what Hazel can do.
For a nice screencast demo of just what Hazel can do, watch this vid from ScreenCastsOnline.com.
This is well worth the shareware fee. Hazel is such a simple, yet powerful program that it should, in my opinion, be built into OS X.
