Boost Efficiency On Your Mac With Trickster And Find Recently Used Files Faster

Apple is a strange company. Their software engineers provide plenty of little utility functions in OS X and then hide them so Mac users can’t find them.

A little exploring goes a long way, but sometimes an enterprising Mac app developer creates an app that does better than Apple’s built-in functions. Do you know where you frequently and recently used files and apps reside?

Menubar Selection? Or, App With Tricks?

Click the Apple icon in the left corner of the Menubar and what do you get? Options. One of them is the Recent Items menu which display recently used apps and files.

It doesn’t do much and it’s slightly hidden, but Recent Items is a good, inexpensive way to find recently used files or launch recently opened apps.

There’s a better way to find and manage recently used files, and it involves the Trickster app.

It works somewhat like Apple’s built-in Recent Items, except it’s much smarter. Click Trickster in the Menubar and get a list of recent app files without having to search all over the Mac.

Whatever file you’ve recently opened and in used, in any app, gets tracked by Trickster.

You control which apps are tracked but using Trickster’s settings. It can track specific apps, specific folders, even files on disks connected to your Mac.

Trickster has control options to watch and exclude.

Not only does Trickster give you a quicker way to find and use files you’ve already used (which saves you from hunting or rooting through the Finder), but files can be used in other apps via drag and drop.

If your Mac has many hundreds of thousands of files, Trickster has an option to filter what has been tracked, which displays only the files you want (again, avoiding the Finder).

Very handy is Trickster’s sidebar favorites option. Click to open recent downloads, favorite apps, browse through Dropbox, and any other folder listed as a favorite. There’s even support for adding files to Evernote.

Trickster’s tools and options remain visible in the lower toolbar, as is the search field. This is a great app to help you stay more organized with better file management, and save you time (no more hunting through the Finder for a file you know you have but don’t know where it is).

When it comes to files, Trickster remembers what you don’t. But this memory comes at a price. Trickster can chew up a bunch of CPU cycles on older Macs running Mountain Lion.

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