Keeping track of in-progress files
In a comment on a previous article (I wish I could remember which one!), someone commented that they’d like to know a bit more about my setup in Tiger. I’m hoping to get to that in a little more depth in the future, but one feature of Tiger that I use extensively is Smart Folders. Specifically, I use Finder labels to mark files that I have to read or review (red), that are pending in some way (orange), and academic PDF articles that I’ve read (green). I can then use a Smart Folder to search for items that have, say, a red label, which gives me quick access to files I need to do something with, without having to file them in a special place, and then re-file them in their proper location when they’re finished with.
However, now that Path Finder 4 is out (and has a load of nice new features), I’ve gone back to using that instead of Finder. Unfortunately, Path Finder doesn’t yet have the ability to deal with Smart Folders because it’s written in Cocoa, and Smart Folders are Carbon-only objects. They are going to be supported in a future version, but they will have to be implemented from scratch. In the meantime, what was I to do without my beloved Smart Folders? Well, I knew that spotlight queries can be run quite easily from the command line using the mdfind command, so I figured that it ought to be possible to write a script in Ruby that could call the mdfind command, process the results and duct tape together calls to the shell and Applescript to construct a kind of home-brew Smart Folders GUI. By running the Ruby script itself using a Quicksilver trigger, I could get hotkey access to the results of my query.
It turns out that there’s a hard way to do it, and a much easier way. Unfortunately, I attempted the hard way first.
