Thursday, March 9, 2017

Desktop Tidy | Nifty and Inexpensive Utility for MacOS

Whenever I see Yevette's Mac with its huge wide screen ... my eyes want to explode because she has billions of things on her desktop and the OCD mind cannot comprehend such disorder.  Nothing is aligned on a grid and icons are stacked on top of each other in much the same way as the British manage their cemeteries.

Note:  that's true about Brit cemeteries.

Desktop Tidy is an eight-dollar utility which is available on the App Store and the link will take you to a preview of it rather than going to the App Store for purchase.


Desktop Tidy creates a 'shadow' Desktop and that sounds kind of secret agent but really it's harmless and the shadow Desktop is another folder elsewhere on your disk.  The program scans your Desktop to discover whether anything new has landed on it.  Unless you have set a rule to ignore that file, Desktop Tidy will 'move' the file to the shadow Desktop.

That may not seem much bloody use since you would not have dropped the file on the Desktop if you did not intend to do something with it so thanks for hiding it, huh.

Desktop Tidy operates via an icon on the Apple menu bar and clicking it yields a list of the files it has pushed off to the shadow Desktop.  You can selectively pull back any file and you won't get into ping pong with the utility deleting the file again since Desktop Tidy will not do anything to a file after you have restored it.



Example of the pulldown menu which comes from clicking the Desktop Tidy icon in the menu bar.  I find this makes access to Desktop files better since it gives me a preview of the file and I can quickly decide what, if anything, I will do with them.


After you have done whatever devious thing you like with the file which was restored to the Desktop, you must manually delete it or you will wind up with the same problem you had previously but this whittles the problem down to one or a few files and I find it makes the Desktop more manageable that way.


There's still some reticence about starting Desktop Tidy on Yevette's Mac because of that blue million or a billion or so files which will poof.  That may be somewhat disconcerting to her and my preference is to be someone other than he who poofed a billion of her files.

Ed:  is part of the reason for this article so she sees it and is more comfortable with it?

Roger that.

Ed:  isn't that kind of sneaky?

Nah, it's systems programming.  Dropping a change on someone when that person isn't ready for it is the bush league kind.

Ed:  now it's like you're some kind of uptown player?

I was an uptown player in this arena through much of my career, Mac.

Ed:  do you miss it?

Nope

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