Hazel 5.1.1
Create an automated system $42 (about £40) FROM noodlesoft.com NEEDS macOS 10.13 or later
Hazel makes it easy to create scripts to perform actions on files using a similar interface used to create smart searches in Finder.
The biggest addition in version 5 is the ability to pull text strings from lists or tables in order to create conditions. You can either create the lists and tables in Hazel itself, or point it at a file. So, say you had files containing notes on clients and the file names contain the surname of the client. You could create a table, or use an existing one, that had the surname in one column and their first name in another. You could tell Hazel to look up the table for the surname, match it to a first name in the same row and append that first name to the filename.
One of the other key changes is that Hazel is now a standalone app, rather than a System Preferences pane. And version 5.1 adds a rule preview button in the toolbar so you can check how a rule works before switching it on.
There are several precreated rules designed to keep your Downloads folder clear and to show you how Hazel works. Once you’ve examined those, you’ll have lots of ideas for your own rules and be able to create them. For example, we created a rule that checked an ‘Invoices sent’ folder for PDFs that were more than a month old and moved them to an ‘Overdue’ folder and sent an alert. Kenny Hemphill