AppFlow

How many applications do you have on your mac?  10? 20? 50?  Chances are there’ll be quite a few, and now that you made your new, smaller, awesome dock, you’ll be giving your applications stack some heavy use in accessing all of your apps that got kicked off the dock.

When you open your applications stack (or folder if you prefer) what do you see?  Chances are you see a long list of applications.  Daunting isn’t it!  ”I know that app is in here somewhere but where?”.  This is a familiar question.  For all of the time that you spend scrolling up and down that stack list, you’re loosing valuable time from your workflow.

The solution to this problem is to organise your applications stack into neat and easy folders.  This means that you can get to the app that you want quickly, without endless scrolling.  This can be achieved in 4 easy steps.

1. Useless Apps

How many of the apps in your application stack do you actually use?  This isn’t a question about whether they deserve to be on your dock, this is a question about whether they even deserve a place on your mac.  Find the apps that have never been used and bin them!  Chuck them in that trash can and make sure that you reclaim any and all precious hard disk space!

(If you actually have a large hard drive, or not much data  jealous you can skip this step)

2. Semi-Useless Apps

There are quite a few ‘semi useless apps’ that will be cluttering your applications stack.  I have several utilities like my HP Printer drivers and BT Home Hub software that qualifies for this.  These type of apps throw straight into your ‘utilities’ folder.  Chances are you’ll never need these programs, but they need to stay for maintenance purposes (like if I have to reinstall my HP Printer).  I also throw menu bar apps that insist on sitting in your applications folder in the ‘utilities’ folder.

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3. Folders

Now comes the exciting bit.  See how many folders you can realistically divide your applications into.  The trick is to get enough  folders that each app can be easily accessed by it’s category, but not too many that there are as many folders as apps.  Getting this balance may take a couple of attempts.

Once you’ve decided on your folders, go ahead and drag your apps into the folders.  For 90% of your apps – this will be a painless move.  Some however, such as the adobe suites, will require a few minutes to ‘repair’ themselves on next launch.

4. Icons

Now you have an applications stack that looks exactly like a documents folder.  You have to look at the name of each folder to have a guess at what it contains.  To be honest, this is worse than what you had before!  The application images are surprisingly useful for letting you know what an app is and gives you a clue as to what it does.

Fortunately, you can change the icon of your folders from those boring blue folders, to the icon for the app that is most going to remind you of what is in that folder.

First you must decide which icon you are going to use for each folder.  For example I use a nice music node for my ‘Audio’ folder.  You may also decide to use the app you use most in that folder as the icon.  For example, the icon for my ‘internet’ folder is the chrome logo, because chrome is my favorite browser.

4a. Changing the Icons

In a finder window, select the folder in question and hit ⌘I.  This pulls up the information of that folder.  Repete this for the app who’s icon you would like to use for the folder icon.  You should now have two windows open, very like below.

To ‘move’ the icon across, simply click it so that it glows blue.  Hit ⌘C, then click the folder and hit ⌘V.  This is a very useful method that can be applied elsewhere across OS X.

Next time on “Keeping Mac Awesome” I’ll have a look at some software that will do the work for you, as well as further speeding up you getting to the apps that you want, and making sure OS X stays out of the way while you work.