Mac OS X only: If you’re tired of QuickTime X’s minimal approach to features or VLC’s clunky, not-so-pretty interface, free app MPlayerX brings a smooth, easy-to-use player to OS X with support for multiple video formats. More »

Windows only: Free plug-in IconViewer adds a new tab to Windows Explorer’s properties screen that views, copies, and saves the icons hidden inside Windows applications and libraries. More »









Microsoft Windows – Icon – Desktop Customization – Windows Explorer – Utilities

Windows: Total Commander, our readers’ favorite alternative Windows file manager, has updated a lot of its geekier and more powerful features, including FTP and file comparison tools. But what fans of Total Commander will really notice is how snappy it moves. More »









Total Commander – filemanagement – File manager – Windows – FTP

Windows only: Adebis Photo Sorter digs through all of your messy photos from eons ago, sorting them by date, groups and type. Because sorting through 16 GB worth of photos is everybody’s idea of fun. More »

The biggest problem with many of the alternative file managers is that some of your shell extensions aren't going to work anymore, so Double Explorer simply loads up the Windows Explorer view for each tab or pane that you are browsing in. Once you've installed Double Explorer and launched the application, you can simply start browsing and accessing your files—though you might want to turn off the navigation pane if you've got a small screen.

The application also has some nice extra features, like a favorite folders toolbar, and it remembers your latest locations when you restart. Double Explorer is free and open source, available for Windows only. Readers might note that it’s still a little rough around the edges in some places, but definitely worth a look if you’re in the market for a new file management application.

The last stop in our series of better file management through ideas based on smart folders brings us to iTunes, iPhoto and Aperture. All of these apps provide support for organizing your files similar to Address Book and Mail. The beauty of “smart” file management, of course, is once you have defined the frameworks for the album, folder or playlist, new content will automatically fall in place if it meets your rules.

iTunes

The first time you noticed a smart “anything with a purple icon” was probably in iTunes. Besides OS X, iTunes is the only piece of software to ship with several built-in smart items. You’ve seen them before, specifically the 90’s Music, Classical Music and Recently Played playlists, to name a few. If you’ve read our previous articles, you know how those work now (and can just right click them to edit their criteria).

But when it comes to iTunes, one thing that invariably also comes to mind is an iPod. If you have at least one iPod, chances are you probably have several iPods. As such, you can set each iPod to sync specific music, playlists or even smart playlists. But since oftentimes our music libraries are larger than the capacity of our iPods, Apple has built in a few unique twists in smart playlist support for iTunes to “shuffle things up.” Here’s a few ideas to get some unique use out of them. (Keep in mind, you can sync multiple playlists, allowing you to mix and match some of these unique smart playlists with your own favorite content.)

Random Tunes

If you have a small iPod, such as an iPod shuffle, you might try a smart playlist that just pulls a random sampling of your music.

Music I Never Listen To

As Apple (perhaps secretly?) wants iTunes to become the Google of your media collection, it has built in tracking of how often you listen to your content. You could create a playlist that showed you all items with a play count of less than 1 for a jam list of music you’ve never heard.

My Top 10

If you are one to tag your songs with star ratings, you could create a playlist of your all time 10 best tunes, based on rating and frequency of play.

iPhoto

The iPhoto equivalent is, as you might have guessed, called Smart Albums. Similar to iTunes, iPhoto provides support for specialized criteria for searching, including criteria based on camera settings and support for Faces and Places. Here’s some ideas for unique iPhoto smart albums.

Group Shot

Keeping track of family photos is easy with faces. If you want to easily see all the photos from your own family, create a smart album that shows pictures based on the faces of any of your family members. (Make sure to set this one to “match any” instead of “match all.”)

European Vacation

In addition to tagging your photos by location (or GPS, if your camera is equipped), you could create a smart album that automatically grouped any photos taken in the countries you visited.

Those Pesky Movies

Newer cameras support the ability to record film, and for lack of a better place to store them, iPhoto imports them right along with your photos. But they’re all mixed up in albums and there’s no simple way to pick them apart. Just create a smart album that looks for the usual video extensions in any text. This should find them by their filename and let you view them all in one place.

Holiday Photos

If you have lots of family and friends who all love to take and share photos, you could create a smart album based on the date photos were taken. For instance, all photos that are in the range of December 20 through December 28 are likely my holiday photos. As more people send you their photos from the event, provided their camera tagged them with the correct date, they will automatically populate the album.

Aperture

Apple’s high-end photo management application also takes advantage of smart file management. Similar to iPhoto, you can use criteria based on EXIF metadata (aperture, ISO, shutter speed, etc.). Despite the fact that Aperture doesn’t support Faces and Places like iPhoto, there are a number of additional options that can make photo management even easier.

A word of caution with Aperture, however. When creating a smart album, Aperture will only search the root level of the location where you store the album. For instance, if I’m viewing my entire library and create one there, it’ll search all photos. If I am in a particular project, however, the smart album will only search photos within that project. As usual, remember that deleting a photo in your library will also delete it from the smart album. You’re just “reorganizing” the same content with smart albums and not actually making a duplicate. (This applies to all smart items: folders, albums, playlists, etc.)

Missing Captions & Credit

Aperture provides extensive support for IPTC data (the metadata you add to your photos after the camera is done with them). You can use this to create albums that show which of your photos are missing captions or copyright information, should you wish to make sure all of your photos are properly tagged.

Need the Ratings

If you’re a photographer who loves to use Apple’s star system to rate your photos, consider a smart album that is based on showing you photos without a rating. It’s a quick and easy way to find any of those photos that slip through the cracks.

Apple’s own apps are certainly not the only to take advantage of “smart” organization. 1Password and NewsFire are just two examples of a growing breed of third-party applications that really harness the power of OS X’s database infrastructure to deliver content organized on the fly by your rules. If you’ve found interesting uses of smart playlists in iTunes or Smart Albums in Aperture or iPhoto, share them with us below.

There are any number of reasons you'd need a quick text file in the working folder—if you're working with icons, testing a new file-based tweak, or just need to make an immediate note—the context menu solution Windows implements is much faster than opening up TextEdit and navigating to the directory to save it. Luckily, this Applescript is an easy solution. Just unzip the file and save the application somewhere on your computer (it doesn't really matter where, but just make sure you don't delete it by accident later), and then drag it up into Finder's toolbar where you want it. Next time you want to create a new text file in the current folder, all you need to do is click your newly-created Finder button—simple as that.

UPDATE: In light of its newfound fame, the developer has rewritten the script (based on the comment of Lifehacker’s own perlhacker) to include file naming and the opening of the file as it’s created. There’s also a version that creates rich text files as well. You can find the updated versions here.

Mac OS X offers a computing experience that, according to many, is still unparalleled by its competitors. Built on a rock solid UNIX foundation and continually adding refinements that make interaction easier, OS X has a lot of powerful functionality that many users were unaware existed. One of these is the idea of “Smart Folders” and with a little primer, you can begin using them to make your Mac experience easier (and faster).

A Brief History

The idea of these Smart Folders are not unique to OS X. In fact, the idea started originally in the mid ‘90s with the now defunct BeOS. When Dominic Giampaolo, a software developer for Be, began working for Apple in 2002, some of the best elements of the BeOS made their way into Apple’s modern operating system. We know these features as “Smart Folders” and Spotlight, both of which launched in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, two years after Giampaolo began working for Apple.

A “Smart Folder” (or “Search Folder” as Windows Vista calls them when Microsoft introduced its version in 2006) is based on the idea that this folder is basically a “virtual folder” of its actual contents. This virtual folder doesn’t physically store copies of its contents inside but rather utilizes a database to store attributes about the files (defined either by the system or the user). This offers several advantages: they have a small file size, the ability for on-the-fly fine tuning of the criteria used to define the content as well as allowing the content to dynamically update as new files meet the criteria. Whoa. What does all of that mean? We’re getting there.

Smart Folders Save Time

In short, Smart Folders save you time. You basically give them a list of rules to follow and they automatically fill themselves with content based on the criteria you’ve defined. It’s important though, to realize that these Smart Folders do not actually represent copies of the content, but merely virtually link to them. If you delete a file out of a Smart Folder, you’ve also deleted it from its original location.

How To Make Smart Folders

Making a Smart Folder is quite easy. In fact, if you’re running Leopard or Snow Leopard, several of them have already been created. You might recognize them due to their trademark purple folder icon (also used to serve the same role in other applications, but we’ll discuss that in future articles). In the left side of a default Finder window, you’ll see an area called “Search For” with entries for “Today,” “Yesterday,” “Past Week” and some more. These are built in smart folders that automatically search your entire system for files meeting those criteria. But we can do far more powerful things with Smart Folders if we make our own.

1. To get started, when in the Finder, go to the File menu and select “New Smart Folder.” You’ll have a Finder window that looks like a search window. (You can also start this process simply by searching from a Finder window.)
2. Next, using the bar beneath the title bar of the window, select the location you’d like this folder to search. The default options are your Mac, your home folder and Shared (any other computers you may connected to). If you’d like it to confine the search to a specific folder, simply navigate to that folder and use the Spotlight function built into the Finder window. (Type something into the field to bring up a search; you can then delete what you typed to move to the next step).
3. Unless you’ve specified some phrase or string in the Spotlight search region in the upper right of the window, at this point you’re not going to be seeing any search results. Let’s give it some actual criteria to search.
4. Click the round plus (+) icon on the right side of the window to show another bar beneath the search location. Where it says “Kind” and “Any” is your first search criteria. These work in pairs. You can change “Any” to documents, images, movies or anything you want. Instantly, you’ll see your search results start to populate based on your selection. Perhaps instead of searching by kind, you want to search by name, contents or date. Clicking “Kind” will allow these changes as well as a mystical “other” option which gives you tons of options for a plethora of different uses. Since OS X is media friendly, you can also select criteria that corresponds to metadata in your media files, such as aperture value of a photo, sample rate for an audio file, video bit rate for video files and more.
5. You can continue to add additional criteria by clicking the plus and adding another row of criterion. Each additional criterion further fine tunes your search. For an item to appear in the results, it will need to meet every rule you have created for it.
6. If you want to save a Smart Folder search, click the Save button in the upper right of the window. Your searches are saved in “Saved Searches” inside the Library folder of your home folder. There’s also a checkbox to automatically add your new search to your Finder sidebar.
7. Editing a Smart Folder is as simple as right clicking it in the sidebar and selecting “Show Search Criteria” or selecting the same option from the gears menu once you’ve double clicked a saved Smart Folder.

Again, the beauty and power of Smart Folders comes from the fact that once you’ve defined the rules, this folder will automatically continue to update as new files are created or saved that meet its criteria.

Folder Inspiration

Smart Folders sound great and once you’ve set one up, you’ll see the process is pretty simple. It’s also pretty powerful but, for inspiration, here’s a few examples of interesting and useful Smart Folders that you could create on your system.

Recent Documents: To view all your recent documents, set the kind to document and the last opened date to within the last 3 days.

Important Files: If you use Finder labels, select “Other” and choose “File label.” Then pick the file label that matches your desired results.

By Device: Have several cameras? You can use “Device make” and “Device model” to specify a particular camera (as well as any other EXIF data).

Do you use Smart Folders? Have any tips you’d like to share or comments on this post? Let me know what you think; I’d love to hear your feedback.

iBin is a small—700k—stand-alone portable application. Place it on your flash drive and run it and create the iBin folder that will be your portable recycle bin. If you have a large flash drive with a lot of files we'd suggest running it for the first time when you're not going anywhere. iBin indexes the entire drive to build a list of files it should protect and send to the recycle bin, it took about 10 minutes for the initial index of 4GB drive at around 95% capacity with small documents and images.

Once iBin has finished the initial drive index it's quite snappy. It comes with a well written manual, but if you skip reading it at least note that in order to delete a file from the flash drive while iBin is running you'll need to hit WIN+DEL not just the delete key—iBin intercepts the standard delete if it is performed on a file it has indexed. All files you delete with iBin end up in X:iBin where X is the letter of your flash drive. In the Custom Options menu of iBin you can specify what happens on deletion, how files are restored, how big the recycle bin should be, and if iBin should auto-clean the recycle bin.

iBin is freeware, Windows only. If you have a portable application that helps you bring desktop functionality with you, let’s hear about it in the comments.

As always, the How-To Geek’s site has an extensive, step-by-step screenshot guide to flicking on the check box selection tools in Windows 7. For those who know their way around, however, the process is simple: Enter “folder options” in the Start menu’s search bar and hit Enter, click the “View” tab on the resulting window, and then check to enable the “Use check boxes to select items” option. Hit Apply and OK, and you’ll see check boxes pop up next to the items you’re hovering next to with your cursor.