Excuse my lack of replies; I have been occupied recently with school. So, I finally managed my time and I decided that I will list the primary features for my idea. To start off, I didn’t really spend much time on the name, and I do admit that SweepIt could have a better name. I do, in fact, like peanut gallery’s idea: Housekeeping. It represents my idea a lot better. However, any ideas are appreciated ;). Thanks peanut gallery! Please provide me with feedback on the following features that I would also like to be included in Housekeeping. You may want to read my original idea before reading this article.
By the way, I think I have come up with a good slogan: “Housekeeping — Outsmart your hard drive.” I know I stole that from Apple’s Mail slogan, “Outsmart your Inbox”, but I really liked it. Besides, I don’t think Apple will mind :)
So now with the features:
- Presets (thanks to smeger)
Housekeeping will include a wide variety of default presets to easily organize your files without doing any manual configuration. For example, one preset would be to organize all your chat logs from iChat by month or even by the contact name (since the filename has the user ID in it as well as the date). Or, how about you want to organize all your desktop screenshots that you have taken in the past? Of course you can organize pictures by which date they were taken, or automatically organize them within folders depending on their rating. 5 star photos in the 5 Star folder, for example. Folders like your Download folder need occasional cleaning. There is definitely a preset for this. There will be a preset for the most common actions. So, basically the Presets list may include something like “Organize by Month”, “Organize by File Type”, “Organize by Spotlight Keywords”, “Move to Trash Every X Months”, etc. Additionally, you can make your own presets. Hence if you want to add the same rules to multiple folders, it’s quick and easy. This is also handy if you want to share your presets with your friends.
- Closet Cleaning
Closet Cleaning is simple. It basically sweeps out your caches, history files, empty disk space, etc. This is bascially another preset that I figured that should have its own category. This preset would be automatically made so the folder with all these archived files would be moved to trash every 2 weeks, for instance. Obvioiusly this can be changed.
- File Combining
Well, have you ever had a bunch of RTF or TXT files which all relate to each other? No problem. This option allows you to combine specific files in a folder. Perhaps the files that all have the keyword, “leopard rumors”, shall be combined, or simply, if you desire, all the files within the folder. So, when files are combined, each file is appended to a new single file of your choice. Images are also simply appended to the RTF. This makes it really easy for printing. But there is still one problem with this feature: what if you want files appended in a different order? Well, maybe you want your Last Modified RTF at the bottom of the new file. Thus it is appended last.
- You choose the Time.
Maybe you want a folder cleaned every month, or just automatically when it’s modified. So if you have been using iChat for a few years, you most likely have a lot of logs. Maybe you want to clean out the one’s that are 6 months old? Easy. Just set it to move the files to the Trash every 6 months.
- Protect your files.
If you’re like me, you like privacy. And sometimes you forget to set the permissions on some files after you use them. For example, how about your chat logs? Maybe you want every file in your iChat logs folder to be protected by itself? I sure would.
- Housekeeping at your command.
So, here you go, you have all these folders doing all these actions on their own. You have no idea. So, there is a built-in history file that records all the actions that the app has applied. Just like Time Machine, restoring and undoing is easy. Nothing will be done behind your back when Housekeeping is working for you ;)
- She’s there, but she’s invisible. (thanks smeger)
Housekeeping runs in the background, so your files are always being taken care of. But you can always check up on her in the log file!
- Lots of available rules.
In Housekeeping, all the rules that are built-in to Spotlight are compatible. (With a Smart Folder, add another filter, click on the drop-down menu and click Other. There should be a huge list of rule choices. At least there was when I was at the Apple Store).
- Catch-all (thanks to wynlyndd)
Well its good that you set rules of files within a folder, but what about the reverse? Maybe you want to search for ALL the PSD files on your hard drive and have them to do specific actions of your choice. I know this feature would be really useful to me because I have PSD files all over the place. Some are in My Documents (yes, still on PC :@), some are in my Website Development folder, etc.
- Appending (NEW)
Well, if you have file combining, you have to have an appending option. For example, if you have grabbed a bunch of information from a site and copied and pasted them to different files. Uh oh, you forgot to put your footnote. No problem, all files within your “Science Project” folder (for example), will have something like “Information supplied by http://somesciencesite.com/atoms.html”, of course it’s your choice what you put. So once this rule is set on a folder, all future files added to that folder will automatically have that footnote added. (of course on only RTF, TXT, etc. type files).
This makes the app have almost endless possibilities. You can come up with many things yourselves of how this will be useful to you.
So I hope you like my current ideas. If you have any further ideas, please contribute them. If you have any questions, I’ll be happy to answer them ;).
