Organizing things using magic folders

Posted on November 13, 2003

Sometimes (actually many times) it’s the little things that get us hooked.

FolderOrg X is an apple script which is supposed to be used as a folder action. And it does a really simple yet incredibly convenient thing: whenever I drop something into the folder it checks to see if a sub-folder named after the current date already exists (and creates it if it doesn’t) and then moves whatever I dropped in the main folder into this “dated” folder.

As simple as this sounds, I’ve always had a folder right on the desktop named “Check Out Later” into which I drop downloads, documents, links, etc which (surprise, surprise) I want to check out later.

Naturally this folder tends to become really crowded as I usually only try to tackle these items every weekend at best and the sheer amount of stuff I put in there means that I sometimes even delete stuff without ever looking at it.

Now that I’ve activated the FolderOrg X script as this folder’s action things just organize themselves auto-magically.

Like I said, nothing too fancy, no rocket-science but it just looks and feels a whole lot better when I open up the “Check Out Latter” Folder and now things are all nice and tidy.

Good heh?

By the way, thanks to Pedro for hacking the script and making it use European-style dates instead of the original USA-style ones.