Fresh (OS X)

Fresh is another one-word application from the makers of Yep, Leap and Deep — that is, they’ve found yet another way to leverage Spotlight into helping your productivity in some way, shape or form that never really makes sense to me.

But this one is interesting, because it’s simpler: it just displays the n last opened or created files on your computer (where n depends on the size of your screen and nothing else, because you can’t resize the list). Yes, you could create a smart folder in the Finder, but who does that? And it wouldn’t open in the middle of your screen at the press of a shortcut.

Fresh also provides a “shelf” (which it calls the Cooler, because those developers are nothing if not dedicated to word play) where you can drop files you expect to need later, which enables you to clean your desktop a bit while keeping a pointer to the files you want to come back to.

And Fresh also offers an interface for adding Spotlight tags to any file you drag onto it, which has nothing to do with the rest of the application’s functionality except that it fits the general theme of helping you organize your files, and they’re evidently quite intent on popularizing OpenMeta (a Cocoa library they created that embeds tags into undocumented system-reserved Spotlight metadata fields so that they can be searchable).

The multiple concept is a bit messy, you can’t resize the icons, and the main window takes too long to fade in, but I like the clean interface and I’m interested in the idea, so I’m going to try using it for a while.

Besides, it’s the first application from Ironic Software that doesn’t take ten minutes to process what it wants to display when I launch it, so I’m a little curious to see what it’s like to actually use something they made.