Filed under: Friday Favorite

Welcome to Friday Favorites! Every Friday, one of us will get all sloppy over an app, web service, or Mac feature that makes us grin like an idiot every time we use it. This week, Brett tells us about his favorite new snippet manager.

If you write code, you probably reuse blocks of it. Whether you're working in HTML, CSS, AppleScript, Objective-C ... it's all code, and a really well-written chunk of it deserves to be used again. You can put a few of your most commonly used snippets into TextExpander, sure, but the biggest problem is finding that function you know you wrote last year but haven't used since. This common little conundrum has given rise to some very elegant applications that aim to solve this and other related problems.

There have been a few great options lately for snippet organization. CodeCollector Pro has been my long-running favorite, with Snippet a close second. I like Snippet's sexiness, but miss having a nice, big, multi-pane window to organize with. CodeCollector Pro is a solid workhorse, but actions such as adding new snippets are a little more cumbersome than I'd like. I often just clip things into Evernote when I'm in a hurry ...

Then, along came Snippets (note the 's' that differentiates it from Snippet) to steal my heart. It's got Code Collector's utility, Evernote's searchability, and it's got an extra dash of sexy, ala Snippet. It has the standard sytax-highlighted code viewer, and a sidebar with groups and folders. Snippets are classified by language, which can be set in a dropdown or by just dragging a snippet to a language folder. It functions on a hybrid folder/tag concept, which happens to be the way I do just about everything. Each snippet can have a description, as well as labels (tags) and all full-text indexed for searching. You've also got groups, which are like folders, but a snippet can belong to multiple groups. It has smart folders which, as you know, function like automatic groups with boolean criteria. On top of all that, folders, smart folders and groups can all be gathered hierarchically in nested folders, with parent folders showing all of the contents of their child folders. Whew!

Omniwriter from David Wogan on Vimeo.

"Where did all my disk space all go?"

When I was in college, each student was allotted 4 megabytes ('mega' is not a typo) of disk space for both email and files. Granted, this was back in the early '90s, before anyone had heard of "www." or had even thought of ".mp3" or ".mp4". In 1995 I acquired a 1GB hard drive and felt like king of the known world. Sure, it was in a case about the size of a loaf of bread, but an entire gigabyte! All to myself! Today I have a Drobo which is in a case roughly the same size as that 1GB drive, but it has 2 terabytes of redundant storage -- 2,000x the space on that prime example of mid-90s storage tech.

One thing hasn't changed: there's still never enough hard drive space. It seems to be as unavoidable as death and taxes. That Drobo? It's about 95% full.

Enter OmniDiskSweeper, a freeware program by The Omni Group which will allow you to find where your diskspace has gone. Now, there are a number of different programs out there for analyzing your hard drive space: DiskInventoryX, GrandPerspective, Baseline, DaisyDisk, and WhatSize, to name just a few. Choosing one may be as personal as which Twitter client or web browser you prefer. I like OmniDiskSweeper for two reasons: it is free and it is simple. It uses the same "Column View" that I use in Finder, and automatically sorts the folders which use the most disk space to the top.

For example, looking at the Drobo, I can see that about 50% of the space on that device is taken up by programs I have recorded using Elgato's EyeTV. You might also find files in unexpected places. A friend recently used OmniDiskSweeper and realized that he had tried to copy a bunch of files to an external hard drive, but something had gone wrong. Instead of moving the files to the external drive, they had just been moved into a folder in /Volumes/.

OmniDiskSweeper makes it easy to delete files right through the app; simply select the file and click the big red "Delete" button. A word of warning! A warning dialogue box will appear, asking you to confirm that you want to "Destroy" the files. They will not be sent to the Trash (since the assumption is that you are running OmniDiskSweeper because you want to reclaim diskspace), they will be deleted immediately.

Today's Friday Favorite is a new one to me, but it's been around for a while. I just picked up the latest version of HistoryHound from St. Clair Software -- more famous, probably, for Default Folder X -- and have been using it constantly for days. Its hotkey already has its own spot in my muscle memory. Here's what it does:

HistoryHound indexes bookmarks, history and cache from all of your browsers, with presets for Camino, Firefox 2 & 3, Flock, iCab, OmniWeb, Opera, Safari, Shiira and URL Manager Pro. It means being able to bookmark willy-nilly in any browser and know that you'll be able to quickly locate noteworthy sites again, in any application.

Not just the bookmarks, though; in the background -- with a very low footprint -- HistoryHound starts indexing the full text of each page. Then you can search for exact or fuzzy matches, or with Spotlight-style boolean keywords for any text on the landing page. Search comes in two flavors: a tiny popup panel which can be assigned to a hotkey and provides a list of matches as you type, and a full, Webkit-enabled search window with page previews and a multi-column result list.