Give In To Your Mac OCD Needs With TidyUp!

My husband is certain that I have this thing called OCD—obsessive compulsive disorder. I like a clean, dust free house. I have perfect makeup and hair. No wrinkled clothing for me. And my Mac? Well, let’s just say it’s like me. Pristine. No fingerprints (I use wipes and Purell). Perfect cloned back ups. And I know where every file resides on my Mac.

Why am I so fastidious if I’m not suffering from OCD (and I’m not saying I am)? No matter the model, your Mac is a work of art, a labor of love, the result of a perfect Vulcan mind meld between designer and engineer. It deserves, no, demands to be well organized, continually functional, and, well, just plain tidy.

Organize This!

A clean, well organized Mac functions better and lasts longer. A Mac is digital chicken soup. It’s good for the soul.

My Mac’s Documents folder is organized pretty much the same way as it has been for 10 or 15 years. Word documents go there. Spreadsheets go here. PowerPoint presentations go in this folder.

You get the idea, right? If it’s 10 PM and you know where your files and folders are, there’s less need to use the dreaded Spotlight, that ragtag Mac OS X search utility that thinks it knows where every file is but can’t seem to find what you want when you want it.

What you want is a tidy Mac. What you need is TidyUp!

The Fragrance of Indulgence

If my Mac were a mere human, she would be a black leather clad dominatrix with heels and a whip. With perfect hair and makeup, of course. An icy glare would send me to the keyboard to repair disk permissions, verify and repair the hard disk, empty clogged caches, delete unused or duplicate files, alphabetize folders.

Or, I would just use TidyUp! to speed through my Mac looking for duplicate files (the clutter of music and photos is enough to put me on Vicodin, regardless of the time of the month). TidyUp! has a Basic Mode which gives you over 90 pre-defined searches, assuming you don’t want to configure filters on your own.

Those of us with more severe OCD may prefer TidyUp!‘s Strategy Wizard, which has more bells and whistles than Tinker Bell or Anne Heche.

TidyUp! finds files, finds duplicate files and folders, gives previews of the most commonly used files using Quick Look technology. It even creates Smart Baskets so the offending found items have a place to call their own until you’re ready to discharge them from their Mac habitat.

No OCD-approved application is worth this kind of expense without a measure of security. TidyUp! has a built-in security feature so you can actually keep at least one file of whatever has been flagged on your Mac. There’s even an undo feature and a way to restore trashed items, even after your Mac restarts.

Is TidyUp! worth the considerable expense? Yes, and no. But it’s less expensive than a month of Vicodin.