SimonWaldman.net

I’m holed up, with a to-do list the length of a football pitch, a load of writing to do (yes, real writing, not just powerpoint!) and a sprinkling of childcare thrown in. Just enough time then to find a bit of software to reduce some of the apps clogging up my hard drive by taking out the non-Intel code out and all the silly non-English language options.

Yes, thank you XSlimmer – which does just that, effortlessly and for about £8. That felt like a hugely productive hour and Firefox already feels that little bit more sprightly as a result.

Although, to be honest, I could have saved as much disk space just chucking out some of the crappy music I never listen to. But, we all know, you can’t actually throw out music, can you?

So – you know that your hard drive is filling up. And you also know that as you’re not going to take all your music, video, powerpoint stuff off, you need to look elsewhere to create a bit of space.

You know there’s all sorts of stuff built up over the years – but you’re just not quite sure where it is, and what’s really massive and what you can live with.

The problem is that going through the finder to work out how big everything is just takes for ever. And you can’t really get folders to sort themselves by size etc, so you have to keep pressing Ctrl-i. So boring.

Anyway – here is WhatSize just to make this whole process a bit easier. It quickly weighs everything on your harddrive -and gives you a finder-like interface where you can see the size of every folder instantly. And all of a sudden Gigs of space are cleared as you get rid of those unused GarageBand Loops etc. Yippeee. Well worth the $12.99 they’re charging.

This really is fab. I’ve tried using DevonThink and Eagle Filer to build up searchable databases of .pdfs.

Both good in their own ways, but just little too much effort – and everything gets locked up in their folder system (for eagle) or a locked down database (for Devon), and you end up with duplicates of things you download and then import.

Imagine my delight when I stumble across Yep from Ironic Software which, in their words is ‘iPhoto’ for pdfs. The beauty is, it just finds pdfs wherever they are on your hard drive, and then lets you tag them and file them. At the same time – it has all the lovely stuff of being able to take a pdf grab of a web page, or print a pdf to Yep. Lovely stuff.