iTunes

The first time you noticed a smart “anything with a purple icon” was probably in iTunes. Besides OS X, iTunes is the only piece of software to ship with several built-in smart items. You’ve seen them before, specifically the 90’s Music, Classical Music and Recently Played playlists, to name a few. If you’ve read our previous articles, you know how those work now (and can just right click them to edit their criteria).

But when it comes to iTunes, one thing that invariably also comes to mind is an iPod. If you have at least one iPod, chances are you probably have several iPods. As such, you can set each iPod to sync specific music, playlists or even smart playlists. But since oftentimes our music libraries are larger than the capacity of our iPods, Apple has built in a few unique twists in smart playlist support for iTunes to “shuffle things up.” Here’s a few ideas to get some unique use out of them. (Keep in mind, you can sync multiple playlists, allowing you to mix and match some of these unique smart playlists with your own favorite content.)

Random Tunes

If you have a small iPod, such as an iPod shuffle, you might try a smart playlist that just pulls a random sampling of your music.

Music I Never Listen To

As Apple (perhaps secretly?) wants iTunes to become the Google of your media collection, it has built in tracking of how often you listen to your content. You could create a playlist that showed you all items with a play count of less than 1 for a jam list of music you’ve never heard.

My Top 10

If you are one to tag your songs with star ratings, you could create a playlist of your all time 10 best tunes, based on rating and frequency of play.

iPhoto

The iPhoto equivalent is, as you might have guessed, called Smart Albums. Similar to iTunes, iPhoto provides support for specialized criteria for searching, including criteria based on camera settings and support for Faces and Places. Here’s some ideas for unique iPhoto smart albums.

Group Shot

Keeping track of family photos is easy with faces. If you want to easily see all the photos from your own family, create a smart album that shows pictures based on the faces of any of your family members. (Make sure to set this one to “match any” instead of “match all.”)

European Vacation

In addition to tagging your photos by location (or GPS, if your camera is equipped), you could create a smart album that automatically grouped any photos taken in the countries you visited.

Those Pesky Movies

Newer cameras support the ability to record film, and for lack of a better place to store them, iPhoto imports them right along with your photos. But they’re all mixed up in albums and there’s no simple way to pick them apart. Just create a smart album that looks for the usual video extensions in any text. This should find them by their filename and let you view them all in one place.

Holiday Photos

If you have lots of family and friends who all love to take and share photos, you could create a smart album based on the date photos were taken. For instance, all photos that are in the range of December 20 through December 28 are likely my holiday photos. As more people send you their photos from the event, provided their camera tagged them with the correct date, they will automatically populate the album.

Aperture

Apple’s high-end photo management application also takes advantage of smart file management. Similar to iPhoto, you can use criteria based on EXIF metadata (aperture, ISO, shutter speed, etc.). Despite the fact that Aperture doesn’t support Faces and Places like iPhoto, there are a number of additional options that can make photo management even easier.

A word of caution with Aperture, however. When creating a smart album, Aperture will only search the root level of the location where you store the album. For instance, if I’m viewing my entire library and create one there, it’ll search all photos. If I am in a particular project, however, the smart album will only search photos within that project. As usual, remember that deleting a photo in your library will also delete it from the smart album. You’re just “reorganizing” the same content with smart albums and not actually making a duplicate. (This applies to all smart items: folders, albums, playlists, etc.)

Missing Captions & Credit

Aperture provides extensive support for IPTC data (the metadata you add to your photos after the camera is done with them). You can use this to create albums that show which of your photos are missing captions or copyright information, should you wish to make sure all of your photos are properly tagged.

Need the Ratings

If you’re a photographer who loves to use Apple’s star system to rate your photos, consider a smart album that is based on showing you photos without a rating. It’s a quick and easy way to find any of those photos that slip through the cracks.

Apple’s own apps are certainly not the only to take advantage of “smart” organization. 1Password and NewsFire are just two examples of a growing breed of third-party applications that really harness the power of OS X’s database infrastructure to deliver content organized on the fly by your rules. If you’ve found interesting uses of smart playlists in iTunes or Smart Albums in Aperture or iPhoto, share them with us below.

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Apple’s original implementation of “smart” file management isn’t just limited to the Finder, and in fact, you’ve probably seen it more often in other applications like Address Book and Mail.

Here are some ideas of how you can harness the power of these two applications using the same idea as Smart Folders.

Smart Groups

Address Book provides support for smart groups which allow for dynamic content, just like a smart folder. As new content is added that meet your guidelines, the group will automatically update.

Creating a Smart Group is as simple as going to File and selecting “New Smart Group…” or by clicking the plus icon (+) in the lower left corner of the Address Book window. Then give your group a name and set of criteria. As you add your second criterion, you’ll have the choice for your group to consist of any of your rules or all of your rules.

Here’s some ideas for useful smart groups.

Upcoming Birthdays

Interested in who might have a birthday this month? Set the birthday criterion to include entries that occur within the next month. (This will include all birthdays within a month of the current date or when you click to view the group.)

Missing Email Addresses

To see a list of people who you do not have an email address for, set the email criterion to include entries that are not set.

My Coworkers

Most companies offer their employees an email address that uses the corporate domain. If you created a smart group for “email” that contains “yourdomain.com” then you will have a group that is always updated with all of your coworkers. An extra bonus, these Smart Groups also show up and autocomplete in Mail.

Or Anything You Want

Since the Address Book allows for a “notes” section on each card, you can use this region to “tag” cards and then use a smart group to show results based on that information. (You could also repurpose one of the other standard fields for this use.) For example, throwing the word “family” into the appropriate contacts’ card would allow for you to create a smart group that just showed your family members.

Currently, Smart Groups cannot be synced to iPods or iPhones. While they also cannot be synced through MobileMe to me.com or Windows computers, they can still sync through MobileMe to other Macs.

Smart Mailboxes

Mail has its own flavor of smart file management too with the implementation of smart mailboxes. To create one, use the Mailbox menu or the plus (+) icon in the lower left of the message viewer and select “New Smart Mailbox.”

Give your smart mailbox a name and choose the appropriate criteria for your mailbox. With the ability to create criteria based on recipient, subject, mailbox, date, message, attachment and more, you can create some pretty powerful mailboxes to help organize your workflow. Here’s a few suggestions.

Recently Viewed

Most people process tons of email on a daily basis and frequently people have multiple email addresses for different purposes. With all of these messages, is there an easy way to find that email you were looking at last night?

Sure! Create a new smart mailbox and select “date last viewed” and choose “is in the last” and specify a number of days.

Recently Sent

If I wanted to quickly find an email that I had sent recently, I could create a Smart Group that showed me messages in the mailbox “Sent” that were “date received” in the past 2 days. Also make sure you tick the “Include messages from Sent” checkbox.

Emails from My Family

Remember the family smart group we made in our Address Book earlier? We can create a smart mailbox to show us all the messages from those family members.

Select “Sender is Member of Group” and then choose the appropriate group from the drop down menu.

Similar to Smart Groups, Smart Mailboxes do not sync to iPods or iPhones nor to me.com or Windows computers through MobileMe. They will only sync via MobileMe to other Macs.

Do you use Smart Groups or Smart Mailboxes? Have any tips you’d like to share? Share them in the comments.

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Mac OS X offers a computing experience that, according to many, is still unparalleled by its competitors. Built on a rock solid UNIX foundation and continually adding refinements that make interaction easier, OS X has a lot of powerful functionality that many users were unaware existed. One of these is the idea of “Smart Folders” and with a little primer, you can begin using them to make your Mac experience easier (and faster).

A Brief History

The idea of these Smart Folders are not unique to OS X. In fact, the idea started originally in the mid ‘90s with the now defunct BeOS. When Dominic Giampaolo, a software developer for Be, began working for Apple in 2002, some of the best elements of the BeOS made their way into Apple’s modern operating system. We know these features as “Smart Folders” and Spotlight, both of which launched in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, two years after Giampaolo began working for Apple.

A “Smart Folder” (or “Search Folder” as Windows Vista calls them when Microsoft introduced its version in 2006) is based on the idea that this folder is basically a “virtual folder” of its actual contents. This virtual folder doesn’t physically store copies of its contents inside but rather utilizes a database to store attributes about the files (defined either by the system or the user). This offers several advantages: they have a small file size, the ability for on-the-fly fine tuning of the criteria used to define the content as well as allowing the content to dynamically update as new files meet the criteria. Whoa. What does all of that mean? We’re getting there.

Smart Folders Save Time

In short, Smart Folders save you time. You basically give them a list of rules to follow and they automatically fill themselves with content based on the criteria you’ve defined. It’s important though, to realize that these Smart Folders do not actually represent copies of the content, but merely virtually link to them. If you delete a file out of a Smart Folder, you’ve also deleted it from its original location.

How To Make Smart Folders

Making a Smart Folder is quite easy. In fact, if you’re running Leopard or Snow Leopard, several of them have already been created. You might recognize them due to their trademark purple folder icon (also used to serve the same role in other applications, but we’ll discuss that in future articles). In the left side of a default Finder window, you’ll see an area called “Search For” with entries for “Today,” “Yesterday,” “Past Week” and some more. These are built in smart folders that automatically search your entire system for files meeting those criteria. But we can do far more powerful things with Smart Folders if we make our own.

1. To get started, when in the Finder, go to the File menu and select “New Smart Folder.” You’ll have a Finder window that looks like a search window. (You can also start this process simply by searching from a Finder window.)
2. Next, using the bar beneath the title bar of the window, select the location you’d like this folder to search. The default options are your Mac, your home folder and Shared (any other computers you may connected to). If you’d like it to confine the search to a specific folder, simply navigate to that folder and use the Spotlight function built into the Finder window. (Type something into the field to bring up a search; you can then delete what you typed to move to the next step).
3. Unless you’ve specified some phrase or string in the Spotlight search region in the upper right of the window, at this point you’re not going to be seeing any search results. Let’s give it some actual criteria to search.
4. Click the round plus (+) icon on the right side of the window to show another bar beneath the search location. Where it says “Kind” and “Any” is your first search criteria. These work in pairs. You can change “Any” to documents, images, movies or anything you want. Instantly, you’ll see your search results start to populate based on your selection. Perhaps instead of searching by kind, you want to search by name, contents or date. Clicking “Kind” will allow these changes as well as a mystical “other” option which gives you tons of options for a plethora of different uses. Since OS X is media friendly, you can also select criteria that corresponds to metadata in your media files, such as aperture value of a photo, sample rate for an audio file, video bit rate for video files and more.
5. You can continue to add additional criteria by clicking the plus and adding another row of criterion. Each additional criterion further fine tunes your search. For an item to appear in the results, it will need to meet every rule you have created for it.
6. If you want to save a Smart Folder search, click the Save button in the upper right of the window. Your searches are saved in “Saved Searches” inside the Library folder of your home folder. There’s also a checkbox to automatically add your new search to your Finder sidebar.
7. Editing a Smart Folder is as simple as right clicking it in the sidebar and selecting “Show Search Criteria” or selecting the same option from the gears menu once you’ve double clicked a saved Smart Folder.

Again, the beauty and power of Smart Folders comes from the fact that once you’ve defined the rules, this folder will automatically continue to update as new files are created or saved that meet its criteria.

Folder Inspiration

Smart Folders sound great and once you’ve set one up, you’ll see the process is pretty simple. It’s also pretty powerful but, for inspiration, here’s a few examples of interesting and useful Smart Folders that you could create on your system.

Recent Documents: To view all your recent documents, set the kind to document and the last opened date to within the last 3 days.

Important Files: If you use Finder labels, select “Other” and choose “File label.” Then pick the file label that matches your desired results.

By Device: Have several cameras? You can use “Device make” and “Device model” to specify a particular camera (as well as any other EXIF data).

Do you use Smart Folders? Have any tips you’d like to share or comments on this post? Let me know what you think; I’d love to hear your feedback.

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The lovely and talented Hazel received an update (to version 2.3) yesterday. Paul Kim of Noodlesoft announced the update on his developer blog, and highlights an update to the already useful App Sweep feature and the built-in script editor, among other improvements. This upgrade, as well as one more prior to the fall release of Snow Leopard (OS 10.6), are free with an existing license.

If you’re not hip to this versatile file management work flow application, you should really give it a whirl using the 14-day free trial. (It’s $21.95 if you decide to keep using it and buy a license.) Just like the fictitious maid that Hazel is surely named after, this application can be configured to tidy up all of your files and folders automatically, leaving you a neat and organized file system to work in. The utility is sort of a cross between Folder Actions and Automator workflows — but built in a way that allows even a novice to achieve powerful results.

To put Hazel to work, just select a folder, and create whatever rules you want. For example, I’ve selected my Desktop folder, and created a rule that moves any application (with extension .app) to the Applications folder. That way as I download something to test, it’s automatically put in its place. I can even add a step to the rule to apply a label color to the application, so I can easily identify it while perusing the Applications directory. Then, a Hazel rule applied to the Applications directory can remove the label after two weeks, assuming I like the app and plan to keep it installed. This is pretty lightweight fare for Hazel, but you get the idea.

As mentioned above, this 2.3 update adds to the App Sweep feature, which ensures that all of an application’s files are removed from your system if you decide to trash an app. The new feature supports multiple user accounts on a computer, which will prompt the other users to allow Hazel to delete their user files for an application that’s been deleted by a different user. In our home, we each have our own Macs, but I could see where this would come in handy for shared computing environments.

I consider Hazel one of those must-have utilities for my Mac — and it works so well, I usually forget she’s even there at all! (If there’s a better mark of a great application, I don’t know what it is.) If you’re not letting Hazel clean up after you already, give her a try for yourself.

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