mac geekery

Smart Folders are easily the hottest new item in Tiger, and they’re powered by Spotlight’s index which just makes them even more powerful. The two places I’ve found that I use them the most are in Mail and the Finder, so I’ll just run over the best applications I’ve found. If you find another, feel free to leave a comment.

Mail

• All Flagged Messages – Obvious. This way you can flag a message to return to it and not lose it or forget about it if it’s in a mailbox you rarely use.
• Today’s Mail – Create a Smart Mailbox that contains all mail that arrived today and get a short-term inbox you never need to clean out. Add exclusion rules to keep mailing lists out and you have a rolling inbox of recent mail only.
• Unread Mail – Similar to the previous, create a mailbox with just the unread messages in Mail (excluding mailing lists, if you want). The mail is still filed in the right places, but you have a quick way of seeing what hasn’t been seen.
• Yearly Archives – Create a folder, one for each year, that holds mail for that year. Makes it easier to browse older mail or just get an idea of how much more mail you’re getting this year.

• Mailing List tree – I file all mailing lists into one large Mailing List folder now and have a tree of Smart Mailboxes show me the individual lists. No more re-sorting when addresses change or whatnot, just an update of the rule and all the messages show in the mailbox. I even made a “Breaking News” mailbox to collect all of the news sites’ mails together into one mailbox.

Finder

• Recent Documents – Quickly organize your Documents and Desktop folders with a simple Saved Search that checks for items in Documents created or modified since yesterday. Works best with downloads from a program where you forgot where it was downloading to…
• File types – Create a saved search for your home folder and all Pages or Word documents. Create a search for all frameworks in the system. Create one for all image files in your home, or your Sites folder.
• Low-quality music – Finally learning to see the evils of encoding at 128 kbps? Create a search (you’ll have to use a Custom field) and find all audio files with a bit rate under 160 so you can re-encode them. Refine by date, or even file format if you like.
• Find all media files with a certain codec – Use the custom search “Codec” and find all media files compressed with a specific codec. Searching on MPEG will show music and video files; searching on Sorenson will get you the high-quality Red vs. Blue episodes.
• Device make – Search on Fuji or Canon and see the photos you took with that model camera (yes, really). This also works for other EXIF fields like exposure or focal length.

• iPhoto Keywords – Search on the “Keywords” field to get the keywords you assigned to the graphic in iPhoto. Keep your originals close-at-hand in the Finder rather than having to go to iPhoto to get them.

I could go on forever. What have you found?