One person's essential Mac app is another person's waste of time and there is software that you cannot work without yet nobody else you know has tried it. However, this might be the one example where not enough people have even heard of it, yet it is software that should be an essential for everyone. If we were Apple, we'd want it included with OS X -- and that was back when we were on the old, ancient, dark days of version 3. Now
Hazel 4.0.1 for Mac is out and it is much improved.
To be fair, the improvements are not going to knock you off your seat. To be fairer, we couldn't see what needed to be fixed from version 3. That turns out to have been a failure of imagination on our part as the only thing we would recommend more strongly than upgrading to Hazel 4.0.1 is buying it in the first place.
You're not going to find a lot of criticism here about Hazel but we can press pause on the praise for long enough to explain what it does. Hazel has always been this software that runs on your Mac all the time, waiting for various things that you have told it to look for. Follow: when we save an invoice to the desktop, we do want to manually drag that into Mail and send it off to a client but we can't really be bothered to then file it away neatly. Over the year, the desktop gets full of these files –– or it used to. Now Hazel sees immediately that we've saved an invoice there and before we can open Mail, Hazel has already copied the invoice to Dropbox and Evernote. Tomorrow, when we've had time to end off that invoice, Hazel will automatically delete the file off the desktop.
You can fill up that trash pretty quickly this way, but Hazel also lets you set rules for how to handle that: you can tell it to actually delete, properly delete it after a week, for instance. You tell it what to watch for and what you want it to do. Then Hazel just does it. Forever.
What version 4.0.1 primarily brings is to do with those rules. The new feature that made us think we should've thought of that ourselves is an improvement to how you create any rule at all. Previously you would tell Hazel that you wanted it to watch your Downloads folder, say, and that if it sees anything there that's a disk image, archive it off here and if it's a JPEG just delete it immediately. Fine, only, you'd switch Hazel on and wallop, every JPEG in your Downloads folder is deleted before you slap your forehead and realise one of those images was of your tax return.
You could and we did scrabble in the trash at times but now you can get a preview of what your Hazel rule will do before it does it. Plus, if something is going wrong, you can now click on an eye icon to see what's been happening. Click on that eye and you see all the files on your Desktop, say, with notes next to each of them about what rule acted on them.
Then you can also sync your rules if you have several Macs running Hazel. Now you can apply those rules to Smart Folders –– though we actually hadn't noticed you couldn't before –– and you can search within Hazel for particular rules. We don't have so many that this is an issue for us but it's a nice addition.
We do have one thing. Even in our few if beloved rules, we've had to resort to AppleScript to pull off certain important parts. What we've always done is search for someone else's Hazel rules online and copied the techniques we needed. Still, it takes time and it has taken us trial and error, so if Hazel 5 could somehow replace or reduce the need for that, we'd be even happier.
Hazel 4.0.1 requires OS X 10.10 or higher and
costs $32 from the official site. If you're an existing user the upgrade price is $10. You can also get a trial version from the official site and we'd recommend you do.
Who is Hazel 4.0.1 for:
It's so useful that it's easier to answer who it isn't for. Join us in the next section.
Who is Hazel 4.0.1 not for:
Hello. Could we say it's not for PC users? It's not for iOS either. If you don't create a lot of documents or you don't have to juggle much information on your Mac, maybe it's not for you. There is also the fact that as simple as it is to use, these things are relative and it will take you longer to get used to Hazel than to Apple Notes.
-William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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