Desktop Traffic Lights

I've been cleaning up my personal subversion repositories and I've come across some files that are little more than an idea quickly noted down. Yesterday I came across an idea I had for a feature for a desktop file/folder environment.

Basically, because I generally don't keep a very tidy desktop I often lose files I've just downloaded or moved to the desktop, so I wanted a way to make recent files flash when I hit some hotkey combination. I was just about to blog about this to ask if this has turned up in any window manager (e.g. I suspected Beryl would be a likely candidate) or as an OSX hack when I realised there was a way I could script something similar using the color labels in OSX.

Basically I could use 4 of the colours (red, orange, yellow and green) to indicate if a file was >28 days old, 28-7 days old, 7-1 days old or <1 day old.

So I started hacking and ended up with a nasty hack in Perl that generated the appropriate AppleScript. It's really ugly and once I resolve issues with the upgrade of my enviroment to OSX on Intel I'll take care of some this (it currently opens a pipe to osascript), I should, but probably won't, translate it all to AppleScript. I also need to hook it in as a folder action (mmmm, AppleScript calling Perl calling AppleScript ... nice) and port it to my Linux desktop (I note my gnome window manager has emblems that could do the same job).

Anyway you can see a "traffic lighted" screenshot to the right, files are currently sorted by modification time and are in order apart from scully_fowler_screenshots.tar which appears to be out of order because the hack also takes account of 'first seen time' the time a file is first seen on the desktop.

Comments

[Stig Brautaset]

Why don't you just open the desktop in the Finder and sort the items by date?

[Greg McCarroll]

Because I like to group similar files by function/purpose and don't like the automatic sorting.

In the example screenshot they are are only sorted by date because I was testing.

Tbh, I'll only know if this was a good idea after a few weeks.