Spirited Away was one of my favorite PPC only applications that got lost in my insistence to be Intel-only (and a favorite of productivity geek Merlin Mann as we mentioned last year). It lives in your menubar and automatically hides background applications after a pre-determined interval. It's an important tool for cutting down on distractions. Unfortunately, Spirited Away seemed to be abandonware; it hadn't been updated in ages and was stuck in resource hogging Rosetta-land. So I was excited to discover recently a new Universal app that does something similar, but with a bit more fine-grained control called Shoo Apps. Unlike Spirited Away, Shoo Apps lets you specify different hiding intervals on an application specific basis (though Spirited Away does allow you to exclude certain apps from hiding altogether). So distraction-free nirvana, right? Well, not so fast: Shoo Apps is $15. So being disappointed I thought I'd look at Spirited Away again and discovered that it had in fact received an update back in February; now it's a Universal Binary and it remains free!Of course, Spirited Away does not have the per application granularity of Shoo Apps, but I generally just want my apps to hide or not hide (e.g. iTunes), so that doesn't seem like a compelling feature to me. Just for completeness sake I should note that Desktopple Pro (which David raved over recently) also has a similar auto-hide feature called "Window Cleaning" (in addition to its main desktop icon hiding feature) for $17.
Shoo Apps is $15 and a demo is available. Spirited Away is a free download. With Spirited Away and Sticky Windows I actually am in distraction-free nirvana.
[Via Macworld (Shoo Apps)]
Update: I've been having some problems with version 0.7 of Spirited Away. However version 0.6 is also a Universal Binary and seems to be working fine. Get it here (download link).
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
5-02-2007 @ 6:13PM
doc jay said...
Spirited Away is great... now only if Doodim was updated to be universal.
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5-02-2007 @ 7:07PM
Sam said...
What makes you think spirited away isn't universal?
the version I'm running here is?
got from http://spiritedaway.drikin.com
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5-02-2007 @ 10:32PM
mark said...
my main problem with spirited away is the fact that the *minimum* amount of time before an app can be hidden is either 30 seconds or 60 seconds. (i tried it a few weeks ago, and i can't remember which.)
i simply couldn't understand the developer's logic, here. since the user *is* given the opportunity to adjust the amout of time before an app hides, why couldn't the slider start at 0 seconds or 1 second? (i prefer 0.) what made him/her assume we'd never want an app to hide in less than 30 (or 60) seconds?
this rendered spirited away completely unusable to me.
i should mention that i've happily been using an app called auto-hide for this purpose for many years, but the last version that works is v1.3.6. v1.3.8 was released at the beginning of 2004, but it was DOA. fortunately i was able to restore 1.3.6 because i had it running on a different machine -- and i'm still using it to this day.
what i like about auto-hide is the fact that it lets you specify separate "never hide when switching from" and "never hide when switching to" lists. brilliant! but the developer has abandoned the app for the last 3 years.
although it still works perfectly, it's a bit quirky: sometimes, the auto-hide configuration window will appear our of the blue, although it wasn't summoned. i still can't figure out why this happens, but it's harmless; i just close the window and keep moving. it happens to me maybe 2 or 3 times a week.
still, there's room for improvement, so i tried spirited away with great expectations, but abandoned it for the reason mentioned above.
i'll have to check out shoo app to see how it compares.
-m
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5-03-2007 @ 1:24AM
E.T.Cook said...
Check out Desktopple from Foggy Noggin...it has all of this capability built it.
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5-03-2007 @ 3:05AM
Fabian said...
-> mark. Spirited away actually let's you set the auto hide time to fractions of 30 s, just by manually typing in the the times instead of using the slider. At least this version.
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5-03-2007 @ 3:45PM
Erostratus said...
Why not just use Isolator?
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5-03-2007 @ 4:52PM
shidoshi said...
Mark - Type "0" in the little box where it shows the current time before hiding. Done. I've used Spirited Away set to 0 for hiding since the very first version was released.
I could never, ever live without Spirited Away, or something similar. Why auto hiding apps when switching into built into OSX at this point I just cannot understand.
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5-03-2007 @ 5:15PM
shidoshi said...
Actually... I may have just jinxed myself. *laughs* I noticed Sam's link, upgraded my 0.5 version with 0.7, and now can't get the think to work at all. So, I guess it's back to 0.5 I go.
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5-04-2007 @ 9:44AM
Josh said...
I wish Spirited Away automatically minimized apps instead of hiding all evidence that the app is running. Does anyone know of an application that simply minimizes windows after they haven't been used in a while?
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5-04-2007 @ 3:33PM
jeffcaylor said...
I've just discovered this little app. Wasn't working till I rebooted, but I like it a lot. @Josh: I think it does leave evidence that the app is still running. You can see in the dock if it has a black triangle, right?
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5-04-2007 @ 11:38PM
Dan said...
I can't get 0.7 to work at all.
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