Rosario Tech

Find the FInder lacking? Want more power when managing your desktop files? Well, then, Cocoatech’s Path Finder is for you. You can use Path Finder as a file management program or even as a total replacement to Apple’s Finder. The program is incredibly customizable; there are so many things that Path Finder can do, I cannot list them all here. There’s a demo that you can try and if you like it, buy it for $35. It’s an awesome program, one I recommend if you need a better desktop file workflow.

Here are just a few of my favorite features:

Open Finder windows in tabs, just like web browsers -

Reveals your current path in the Finder

(Click on for a couple more)

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Before you run out and update to Leopard, pick up AppFresh, a free program that will let you know which of your applications are as up-to-date as possible. Since it’s only compatible with Tiger for the moment, don’t update to Leopard and then run it. Update your apps before you put 10.5 onto your system.

AppFresh runs through all your applications (and widgets, plug-ins, preference panes) and let’s you know whether you have the latest version installed. It can take a little while for AppFresh to run through all your apps and stuff, but be patient. Here is what you’ll see if a program needs updating:

Here, it’s letting me know there is a newer version available to download.

It can also let you know the last time you used a program:

So you can think about deleting it if you haven’t used it in a while. (try using App Zapper to delete old apps)

It’s a nice little free program, albeit with no built-in help; you will need to visit the website for help. But, it’s free and can help as you need to update those programs for Leopard.

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.