It was supposed to find these orphaned files, and it did find some, but I found that Hazel had to clean up after Parallels Toolbox! I wrote to the Parallels people and their support was completely uninterested in my findings and wanted me to send them log files and such. I used to use Parallels Toolbox’s Uninstall Apps tool to delete apps. They might not cause a problem but they may someday, so why not delete them? With Hazel, if you enable App Sweep, and you throw an app in the trash, after just a couple of seconds, Hazel will pop up a window asking you if you’d like it to clean up the cruft left behind. If you delete an app by simply throwing it into the trash, you’ll have all kinds of cruft left behind on your system, such as plists, cache files, save states, and downloaders. One of my favorite newly-discovered tricks in Hazel is a feature called App Sweep. Hazel App Sweep removing iStatistica Orphaned Files If it gets over, say, 1GB, it will delete older files. You can have Hazel delete files in the trash when they hit an age of your choosing, and you can even have the trash kept to a reasonable size. I’m embarrassed to admit that there are a few things Hazel can do that everyone would like but I only discovered very recently. After it sent the file up, it would politely throw the file in the trash. Then if Dorothy put a new version of the JSON file into that folder, Hazel would find the match to the name and use its own built-in FTP tool and send the file with my credentials to my server. I created a folder in Dropbox called ftp-to-podfeet and shared the folder with Dorothy. I’d trust Dorothy with my life, and certainly with my technical digital life, but we wanted to figure out a way around this just for the geekiness factor. I have Hazel watch deleteme and after files are a week old, they get moved to the trash.Īt one point, when Dorothy and I were working out the process for her to keep the Programming by Stealth index up to date that she created, we thought we needed her to FTP stuff to. This folder is named in a way that tells future me I already have a copy of any file found inside, or the file was never important enough to keep. I’ve told you a few times that I have a folder on my drive called deleteme. Simple deleteme Rule after 8 Days to Trash That folder, in turn, is one of the folders that is watched by Hazel and moved to the Synology when it gets stale. Hazel keeps a watchful eye on my downloads folder, and when it finds a file matching the pattern of my podcast naming convention, it moves it into my podcast audio folder for safekeeping.
When it’s done it offers to also download the finished MP3 file. As you can imagine, I create a LOT of data for the podcast each week and after a couple of weeks, I’m certain I don’t need it with me on my laptop, so it gets filed away on the Synology into different folders depending on the content.Īfter I record the NosillaCast, I upload it to a service called Auphonic, which levels the audio, sets it to the loudness standard for consistency, adds the album artwork and uploads the MP3 file to my hosting provider, Libsyn. My favorite usage is that I have it watch certain folders and when the files within get stale, it moves them to my network attached storage (a Synology Disk Station). I do use Hazel for scanning documents but that’s actually not its primary purpose for me. My use cases for Hazel Complex NosillaCast Audio File Rule I eventually broke down and watched David Spark’s Hazel guide and I finally “got” it. Why would I want an app that watched folders? The early examples were for people who were scanning in documents and I wasn’t scanning in documents at the time. When I first heard about Hazel, I didn’t “get” it. Hazel’s mission in life is to watch folders for you and take action on the files within.
I’d find it very hard to work without a clipboard manager now, using it several times a day. And then I got Copy ‘Em and I’ve never looked back. I was in the second camp for a very long time because I simply couldn’t understand why I would ever need to go back to my clipboard history to get something.
There is a category of apps that provide a unique functionality and for which the user community is split into two camps: Those who are zealous about the functionality and really “get” why it’s awesome, and those who don’t get why they would ever need the functionality.Ī perfect example of this is clipboard managers.