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Daily Trick 30. Smart Folder 2

In our previous daily trick, we have discussed about the Canned Searches, which is also known as Smart Folders. And in this daily trick, we are going to talk about creating your personalized Smart Folders, not just using the pre-defined searches.

First of all, you should open Finder window. And then followed by these steps:

Press down Cmd-Shift-F to search items with a keyword, or you can also use Cmd-F to search items their kind
Now you can use the available option box to narrow down your search results.
Let's say you want to have a collection of JPEG Images, the option box selection will be Kind → Images · JPEG
You can add more constraints by pressing the (+) button sitting on the right side
After you have finished with the constraining, click on the (Save) button and a popup dialogue pane will appear
Fill in the name and don't forget to tick the checkbox labeled Add To Sidebar
Upon hitting Save button for confirmation, your search terms and constraints will be saved in the form of Smart Folder and added to Finder Sidebar

Now, you can create as many Smart Folders as you want. And this will save your time by avoiding repetitive insertion of search constraints.

Categories: Daily Tricks
Tags: Folder

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Daily Trick 29. Smart Folder

One of our readers, Mahdi Hosseini, stumbled on the Smart Folder trick and he is eager to share with us.

Smart Folder Trick

I came across a cool thing buried inside Finder.app.

If you like the current Canned Searches that could be used to search for certain files, such as All Documents, All Images, etc, and wish to have more search categories, worry not.

You can follow these steps to browse for more:

Open your Finder and hit Cmd-Shift-G for opening Quick Address Jump
Copy this address into the popped-down box: /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/Resources/CannedSearches/
You will find many Canned Search/Smart Folders inside with different search categories, you can drop some to your sidebar
Everytime you want to do the searching, just click on the folder

For example, by using the Smart Folder: All PDF Documents, you don't need to search all over the place to find your PDFs, single click on this Smart Folder will do the job.

End of the Trick

Many thanks to Mahdi for this little useful trick.

Categories: Daily Tricks
Tags: Folder

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Smart Folder on Finder

Searching with Spotlight has long become my habit to search for certain cluttered of files which I usually forgot where I put them. Even sometimes my search result returns another cluttered of files that I will need to add certain criterias to limit the search. These criterias include limiting search by adding more keywords, limiting the scope of the search and adding specific attributes (eg. Kind is Images).

Though after adding these limitations I will easily find my files, yet for me it seems to be such a hassle to do it again and again. But, to be really exaggerating, Smart Folder saves my life!

Using Smart Folder, you can save your search criterias into one beautifully constructed purple gear folder - it's the icon. And to do the same search again, only single click on the smart folder is needed.

Faking Folders Icon

Actually, the outcome of this trick won't give you any great significance to your skill in using Mac. What I intended here is to share several useful tricks and wrap them up in a fun way. I hope in such a way, you can memorize them better.

For a teaser, let's see the outcome for this fun tip:

The Outcome

As I've said previously, the outcome is less important than what you will get during the process. As Steve Jobs said, "The Journey is the Reward".

Let's get started.

1. Detect Location

Dock is separated into two portions, which the first one can contains applications and the other one can only contains folders. Here, you will be guided to mirror applications and folders. To get things quickly done, it will be best to change the folder's display rather than another way round.

As you cannot access the file information directly from the Dock, it's essential to know where is the file location.

Control-Click on the folder/application
Choose Show in Finder from popped up contextual menu
New Finder window pointed to that item will pop up

Delete Files without Going to Trash Folder

Warning: The deleted files are not recoverable.

This is just a simple and quick UNIX tip to delete files without going to trash folder first. What are the steps?

Delete Normal Files

Open Terminal.app
Type rm -rf
Highlight files/folders you want to delete
Drop them all to Terminal
Execute it (pressing Return)

Leopard Take A Look - Applications Folder

Why does Leopard display Address Book as an icon for Applications Folder? Why is one of Application icon broken?

Automatically Arranged By Name

The Application Folder automatically stacks up all Applications inside by their alphabetical order. Since our (my) Address Book ranks highest by its alphabetical order compare to others, it's displayed as Application icon followed by others' with no opacity, i.e. we can only see a little portion of others'.

The very same rule also applies for those folders located at the right part (launching part is the left part) of Dock.

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