Mac Hacks: 17 AppleScripts To Make Your Life Easier

Finder Utilities

14. Pack’em

Pack’em takes one or more items from Finder, packs them with tar, compresses them with either bzip2 or gzip and saves the compressed archive in the same folder as the original items. A great companion to the Send Attachment Droplet. With these two AppleScripts, you can compress and email a set of files or folders directly from Finder.

Pack’em
Type: Simple Script
Requirements: None

Pack'em screenshot on choosing the compression format

Pack'em screenshot on the result of packing

15. Rename Files

Just drop a folder into this Droplet, and it will give you a lot of options to batch process its contents. You can rename the files according to names specified in a particular text file or change the files individually. Either way accomplishes your task much faster than by changing every file name independently.

Rename Files
Type: Droplet
Requirements: None

Rename Files screenshot on dropping

Rename Files screenshot on first level script options

Rename Files screenshot on second level script options

Rename Files screenshot on third level script options

16. Websafe Name

If you develop websites, you are probably accustomed to giving your files Web-friendly names. But there are times when you have to upload a whole set of files sent to you by a client, or upload things that you weren’t expecting to use. Websafe Name is very useful for this kind of task. You don’t even need to look through the list of files; just drop them into this script, and it will rename them to something Web-friendly.

Websafe Name
Type: Droplet
Requirements: None

Web safe name screenshot on dropping

Web safe name screenshot on the resulting file

17. Tagger

The “folder” is a computer interface paradigm that is a very powerful way to organize files. But it’s neither the only paradigm nor the best solution for all scenarios. Many sub-folders nested deep is a sign that a folder structure may not be appropriate. Another great paradigm, coming straight from the Web, is “tagging.” You keep all your files flat in a common location, but group them by tags so that you can retrieve or filter them by tags. It so happens that the Mac OS X has very good support for this. You can use Spotlight Comments to tag files and Smart Folders to dynamically retrieve them. All you need now is an easy way to do this, and this Folder Action does exactly that.

To use Tagger, attach it to a folder. Then, every time you add a file to that folder via Finder, the script will prompt you to tag that file. It also automatically creates Smart Folders for all of your defined tags.

Tagger
Type: Folder Action
Requirements: None

Tagger screenshot on prompt for tag name

Tagger screenshot on the generated smart folder

Further Resources

If you like the scripts above, you may also be interested in the following articles and related resources:

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