XShelf - A temporary storage spot for items in transit
Jun 10, '03 12:02:00AM
Contributed by: robg
The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 9 out of 10]
- Developer: Karl Hsu
- Price: Uncrippled donationware
A slightly off-beat but unique and useful PotW this week. XShelf is a small applicationt that provides ... well ... a shelf. This shelf is self-resizing and can live attached to any screen edge, or as a free-floating vertical or horizontal window. When stored on a screen edge, only a tiny thin line indicates that the shelf is even there (it pops out like a drawer when you mouse into it).
What do you use the shelf for? Basically, the XShelf shelf is a temporary home for items in transit. If you've ever tried to file an item from your desktop into a folder that's 10 or more levels deep on your hard drive, you know it can be a bit tricky. If you use spring-loaded folders, you have to keep the mouse button pressed the whole time, or else you'll end up filing your item somewhere along the path. If you drag into a column-view window, you still have to navigate across the columns and drill down into the final destination. With XShelf, you simply drag the item to the shelf, release it, then open a window at the destination. Mouse over the shelf, grab the item, and move it to the destination. Yes, this is more steps than using spring-loaded folders, but it's a heck of lot easier for deeply buried folders. While the item is on the shelf, it still appears at its original location. If you change your mind about moving the item, you can just control-click on the item on the shelf and delete it (it deletes the "shelf" item, not the source). But when you move the item off the shelf, the original vanishes, just as if you'd moved it in one step -- even if you move it out six days after you added it to the shelf.
XShelf has some nice features, such as automatic grouping of multiple dragged items (you see a small white number on a red circle indicating the item count), the ability to 'lock' an item on the shelf, the self-expanding feature that makes the shelf as large as necessary on the fly, and a full set of preference features. It's clearly not a required tool for most filing operations, but if you find yourself moving things from the desktop into deeply buried sub-folders, it can be a real timesaver.
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