Freeware February: Eole
If you're anything at all like me, your OS X Desktop is a bottomless pit of every file you've ever downloaded or saved and all your icons are often stacked on top of each other, 2 and 3 levels deep. Or maybe you use your Documents folder as the clearinghouse, tossing not just documents in there, but also images, mp3 files, quicktime files, url clippings, etc... you know, things that actually should be filed in some of those other folders that Apple thoughtfully created for you in your Home directory!
If you want to finally rid yourself of the clutter without having to do the sorting and filing yourself, then
Eole is for you.
Eole is an
AppleScript bundle that "ventilates" whatever files reside in the same folder you place it in. Subfolders are created (also named Eole) within each of the major Home directory folders:
Documents, Movies, Pictures, Music and Sites – plus another one in ~/Library/Scripts. To use Eole, just move it onto your Desktop or into whatever folder you want to clean up, double-click it and then watch it work its magic.
Eole is the French name for Aeolus, the god of wind. Before your very eyes, your Word docs and pdfs will be "blown" to the Documents folder. Your gifs and jpgs to the Pictures folder, mp3 and other audio files to Music, etc. The script handles most common file types, and since it's open source, you can easily modify it to accommodate other files or move things to different places, even if your AppleScript skills are primitive (behold the power of copy, paste and find & replace!).
By default, Eole doesn't move applications, aliases or compressed files like sit, zip or disk images. I like to keep copies of my downloads (which default to my desktop), especially software updates and shareware, so I modified the script to also place sit, zip, and dmg files into an "Installers" folder that I created in my home directory. I'm no AppleScript whiz, but it only took me a few minutes to figure out how to modify Eole in Script Editor to my liking.
Eole is freely available from Doktor Kleanor, the only website I've come across in my travels that offers not only English, Fench, Japanese, Dutch, Italian, and Spanish translations, but Serbian and Esperanto too!
It's free. It's multi-lingual. What more do you want???