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Tidy up the Applications folder with symbolic links
Authored by: robarmo on Nov 27, '03 10:12:50PM

I agree that the .app idea is a great one and not always used to its full potential.

However, moving all your applications and putting symlinks in their place sounds like more work than necessary, especially if you've be a got a lot off apps, and/or could cause unforseen problems when updating in the future.

Wouldn't it be simpler to just create an alternative Applications (& Utilities) folder, containing aliases of the applications you want to include? I keep it in my Home folder. You can organise the aliases into sub folders until your heart's content. I mix applications installed for my own use with aliases of the ones installed for all users. I've added it to my dock so I can right-click to get a contextual menu of all my applications in categories. (Am I right in thinking that Panther users could also add it to the Finder's sidebar?)

Don't forget that this approach would also allow individual users to organize the applications to their own preferences, and all done through the GUI!

Hope that helps someone.

Rob.



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Tidy up the Applications folder with symbolic links
Authored by: dkulp on Nov 28, '03 12:34:08AM

Yes, in Panther, just put your applications folder in your Sidebar (aka Favorites in OS X.2).



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Tidy up the Applications folder with symbolic links
Authored by: leenoble_uk on Nov 28, '03 10:12:25AM

I have to agree, that sounds like the best approach.
Waaay back in OS9 days I used to organise my applications into subfolders (Graphics, Sound, Video, Utilities, etc) but in the end I gave up and reverted to one folder for all because it just got in the way. If you know you're looking for an application called Foo. You have to think, now what type of application is Foo and then open that folder and find Foo. If I know what something's called I can find it easily within an alphabetical list.
Then again, if I know what it's called I can just do Cmd-Space and type the first few letters and LaunchBar will find it for me.

But if you don't have launchbar, then using the aliases in your own applications folder seems like a good solution. You can also put the same app in a few different categories of course which would make finding Foo a little easier.

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So, I said ... well, I can't actually remember exactly what I said. But it was one of the most enormously cruel and frighteningly witty put downs ever.



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