How To Use Your Mac As A Digital Box To Store Stuff.

Most Mac users have two kinds of clutter on our Macs. Files which we scatter here and there, or try to organize in the Documents folder.

Then, there’s everything else, including notes, photos, email, and so on. My unclutter tool of choice are Together. Alexis prefers ShoveBox, so I thought I would give it a try.

This digital age in which we live is nice and everything, but it sure generates a lot of information, all of which passes our eyes all too quickly, and most of it-- the stuff we think is important and want to save-- needs to go somewhere.

Important files are rather easy to manage. That’s what the Documents folder is for in Mac OS X. Organize your files into folders and subfolders and simply try to remember what you put where. Easier said than done, right? Right.

Still, my Documents folder is rather well organized, and I can usually find any file I need within a few seconds. Spotlight becomes my search tool of last resort.

For everything else, I love the convenience of an organizing tool like Together. Whatever information I want to save all I need to do is drag it to Together and it stays there.

ShoveBox works mostly the same way, but with a few differences. Unlike Together, which creates a floating shelf-like tab on the side of your screen, ShoveBox lives in the Mac MenuBar as a little cardboard box with an arrow.

Drag stuff you want to save to the Menu Bar and drop it on the arrow. That’s it. It’s captured. Stored. Put away. Shoved into the box. Text clips, notes, email messages, photos. Whatever. Shove it in the box.

Need to remind yourself of something with a little note? The ShoveBox Capture menu lets you create notes of text with QuickJot. ShoveBox can be set to run when you start up your Mac, so it’s always there, sitting in the Menu Bar, waiting for you to shove something into it.

You can set up HotKeys to activate QuickJot, or paste something directly to ShoveBox, or to open ShoveBox (so you can see what you’ve stuffed inside).

Select Organize from the ShoveBox menu and you’ll see everything you’ve saved. The user interface is similar to everything else on the Mac. A right column which lists items, and a left column with folders where you can sort everything you’ve stored.

Items can be sorted however you want, labeled in different ways, and even flagged for importance. The interface is clean and simple and almost self explanatory.

The ShoveBox tool bar has icons for Delete, Labels, Flag, and Export. There’s also one for Capture so you can create a QuickJot note, import something from your clipboard, or create an iSight image.

That’s right. More than half of all Macs sold these days are notebooks, either MacBooks or MacBook Pro models, and all come with the iSight camera built in. ShoveBox lets you create an image using iSight.

Why? I don’t really know. The feature did not work for me all of the time, and it didn’t create a video, just a quick capture of me staring into my iSight camera.

A real feature would include recording a video message and making it available for email or as a reminder.

ShoveBox follows the mantra of ‘less is more.’ You may be expecting ShoveBox to give you more, but you’ll get less. Maybe less is what you’re looking for. Less clutter. Less mess. A central location to store stuff.

ShoveBox does that. It stores stuff. It doesn’t take much to want it to do more. That’s one of the problems we have with our Macs these days. Once we find a handy utility that we like, we start wanting it to do more and more and more up to the point of having it do email and browse the web.

Alright, not quite. But you get the idea. For what it does, ShoveBox does it well. It stores stuff so there’s less clutter on your Mac, and that’s not bad for $25, $14 less than Together, which remains my favorite unclutter tool.

Check out the daily list of our 9 Word mini-Reviews at NoodleMac, and Kate's daily in-depth Mac software reviews at PixoBebo.

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Off Topic #58 - Do politicians use personal computers? Of course. We’ve heard Barack Obama prefers a Mac, while Hillary Clinton uses a Dell, though, apparently neither of the candidates can bowl. Does Obama’s potential vice president use a Mac? Even Clinton acknowledges Apple’s brand power but says she can’t afford a Mac. Maybe she’d win if she used a Mac.