Hazel Update Now Matches Dates Inside Your Files And Much Much More

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Hazel, the must-have Mac file-wrangling utility, has just been updated to v3.1. That doesn’t sound like much, but there are some real big new features in here. for instance, it can now match dates typed inside your files, as well as upload files and more. Check it out:

Hazel is an app that sits in the system preferences and watches any folder you tell it to. Then, when something happens in that folder, it performs an action on the relevant files. The simplest thing is to move the files into other folders to tidy up, but you can resize images, run Applescripts and shell scripts, set the color label of all pictures shot with an aperture of ƒ8 and so on. It’s almost ridiculously powerful.

Hazel could always dig inside your files (it relies in Spotlight to do its magic) but now it can recognize dates, and then use those dates to do things. Say you scan your utility bills once a month and let Hazel feast on them. Previously you could have it rename the files with a date in the filename, but that date would be today, or the date created or whatever. It wouldn’t be the date printed on the bill. Now it can be, which is pretty amazing.

And that’s not all. Hazel can also upload files to the server of your choice via FTP, SFTP or WebDAV. And there’s more.

  • Added new “Upload” action to upload files via FTP/SFTP/WebDAV
  • Can now use patterns to match against and extract a file’s contents. Note that this only works for certain file types like PDF and certain text formats (if it can be properly viewed by TextEdit, chances are it will work).
  • Added a custom date token type. Can use it to match dates in text and then be used as a date in other patterns.
  • Rules can have notes/descriptions added.
  • Move/copy/upload actions now have an option to copy over the folder structure. This is akin to using the “source folder” attribute but the hope is that that attribute can be phased out in the future in favor of this, which is much easier.
  • New option to not overwrite the existing file when copying/moving/uploading.

And that’s just the new features. There are also tons of tweaks in the update which make Hazel easier and prettier to use. I haven’t though of anything to do with the new features just yet, but I’m working on it. The update is free for registered users, and just $28 if you’re foolish enough not to have bought it yet.

Source: Noodlesoft

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