Mac OS X Hacks

Keeping Your Snippets Organized

DropDrawers is one of those applications you have to try to believe. It’ll keep all those bits and bobs littering your Desktop neatly tucked away until you need them and helps stamp out stickies proliferation.

Are you one of those people whose desktop, both real and virtual, is littered with colorful sticky notes too numerous to actually see much of anything else? While Jaguar’s stickies (Applications → Stickies) provide disposable spaces into which to drop thoughts, URLs, phone numbers — anything you can paste — it’s not particularly well integrated with your other applications. A URL pasted into a sticky can’t, for instance, be double-clicked and opened in your web browser. Even an alias to a folder dragged into a sticky doesn’t mean the folder is just a double-click away.

DropDrawers (http://www.sigsoftware.com/dropdrawers/) ($20; fully functional demo available for download) by Sig Software provides much-needed cubby holes for stowing and organizing those bits and bobs that otherwise clutter up your Desktop, browser’s bookmark list, or proliferation of yellow stickies: file and folder aliases, URLs, scripts, snippets of text, and what have you. If you can drag and drop it, you can stuff it in a DropDrawer.

Install DropDrawers and you’re provided some sample drawers to get you going:

• A Processes drawer (see Figure 4-3) displays all the applications that are currently active.

• The Launcher holds application shortcuts.

• Web Sites contains a collection ...