My Favorite OS X add-ons: Hazel

Next in this series of my favorite OS X add-ons: Hazel, by Noodlesoft.
Hazel really is one of those things you install, set up and then never have to pay attention to. It just does it’s work for you while you’re doing more important stuff. It cleans up places, moves files around and sorts things out.

Hazels preference pane resides in your system preferences. Here you can make settings and set up rules. The main thing I use it for is to clean up my desktop. My desktop background is plain black and I like to keep it empty. So I tell Hazel to move everything that accidentally ends up at my desktop (like downloaded or saved files) into a specified folder. I use a general inbox on my computer where all new stuff goes. So Hazel drops everything from the desktop in the inbox folder.

You could also tell Hazel to move all pictures to your pictures folder, movies to your movies folder and music to your music folder. Or give files a certain label: Mark all files red when they haven’t been clicked on for a week for instance. And then move them to the trash if you didn’t open them after another week. It takes some smart configuration, but once set up it’s great to have something do the cleaning for you!

Hazel is not free, there’s a 14-day trial period and after that you can purchase a license key for
$21.95, which equals about €17,25.