Unclutter App Sweeps Away Desktop Detritus
Unclutter is the app which will finally – finally! – tidy up the embarrassing mess that is your Mac’s desktop. It does exactly what its name suggests, sweeping your unfiled files under its virtual rug, and giving quick access to a notepad and your clipboard.
Install the app (it’s a mere $3 from the Mac App Store) and you get a little icon up in the menubar. Drag a file from your desktop to the top of the screen and up pops the panel, giving you a place to drop it. And that’s it. Your temporary or oft-used files are right there, ready to be grabbed at a moment’s notice.
To open the panel for retrieval, put the cursor at the top of the screen and scroll down (a two-finger swipe on your trackpad) to make the panel appear. You can make a quick note, or access your clipboard.
The files are actually moved to a folder in Unclutter’s own Application Support folder (in your library). You can navigate there in the Finder, or right-click a file in the panel to reveal it. By default, this folder isn’t indexed by Spotlight, but you could add it to the index if you wanted to.
I installed Unclutter as soon as I heard about it. I keep a clean desktop, but sometimes I just have to have a few files or folders on there. Now I can keep them out of the way, and use the desktop as a true, super-temporary site for organizing files.
The notes are pretty neat too, although this would be a perfect place to mimic the functionality of the excellent Drafts app for iOS. Just sayin’.
- Source Unclutter App
Charlie Sorrel sits in his gadget nerve-center in Barcelona, Spain, and spits out words about various weird plastic widgets while the sun shines outside his iCave. Previously found at Wired.com's Gadget Lab covering cameras, power cables and sneaking in as much Apple-centric coverage as he could, Charlie spends his rare moments outside perched atop a bicycle and snapping photos. You can follow him on Twitter via 
