Filed under: Software, Odds and ends
The Big Mean Folder Machine 1.5 kicks it up a notch
Why would you want to do either of these tasks? Let's say you're trying to back up 30 GB of photographs to DVD. You can either start dragging files to a folder and keep checking with Get Info to see if the folder size is less than the writable size of a DVD, or you can just have BMFM automagically split the group of files into folders that are perfectly sized for DVD burning. Or let's say that you want to take individual folders for former clients and turn them all into one big "Former Client Archive" folder. It's easy to merge all of the files in those different folders into one big archive folder. The Big Mean Folder Machine takes care of file name conflicts in that case.
Version 1.5 adds the ability to create deeper hierarchy levels (dependent on the number of files per level) and restores MP3/AAC functionality. A trial version limited to 100 files is available for download, or you can buy the application for $14.99.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Niels Olof Bouvin said 4:20AM on 10-26-2008
Folder Splitter is also quite good.
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kevteljeur said 8:48AM on 10-26-2008
It's a very handy app, and does something which had me stumped for a couple of years which is great and I was delighted to find it and buy it. But when you get past the sheer usefulness of the basic functionality of the app (and it looks good too) then things like the lack of preferences, inability to remember settings and lack of flexibility really start to become a problem.
I use this app for one task only (sorting photos by date), and even with that, I have to set up every damn parameter every time I open it up - isn't having preferences such an easy thing to do in a Mac app? It has no workflow memory at all. The fact that there is no 'About' panel or preferences menu item shows that although the developer worked hard on the sorting ability, he left everything else to one side, which is unfortunate. Being number one in a field of one means there's unlikely to be a challenger which has these issues covered.
It's also so specialised that I got the excellent Finder Rename (from the same developer) for pre-processing the names of all the files before sorting them; I understand the developer's thinking behind selling two apps for that, and it is probably beyond his ability to have some sort of integration of the two, but you can see how I might find that in this day and age it's a pretty primitive process to have to run one app and then configure and run another, just to handle a few image files. I'd have paid the price of both or more to have one app to handle the whole lot in one easy well thought-out package (or at least having the droplets functionality for the Big Mean Folder Machine, I could Applescript the rest if that's what I needed).
Props for producing such a useful app, but it really does need a lot of work for the aspect of productivity which is setting up your workflow from scratch each and every time you use it.
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Joseph said 10:39PM on 10-26-2008
I use Hazel -- it is insane. I have like 10 rules running on my desktop and have it auto sort files to folders. It even allows me to rename my screen shots from picture 1.png to screenshot-##-##-##_##:##:##.png.
combined with grabup, i am quickly able to get a screenshot on the web and off my desktop.
This definately looks cool and i am going to check it out.
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