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).

It seems there are two slowly diverging schools of thought in terms of working on a Mac: to multi-task, or not to. While an independent (though Apple-commissioned) study has been released supporting the increased productivity theory via larger displays and more stuff on-screen at once, not everyone sits in the same camp. Merlin Mann of 43folders is one of those campers who is thinking different, and Russell from our sister-blog DV Guru dropped a note to say the latest episode of MacBreak (iTS link) features Leo and Mr. Mann waxing ecstatic on all things uncluttered and distraction-free. They cover techniques and tweaks for clearing your workspace in the Finder, as well as using 3rd party tools like our TUAW-favorite Quicksilver, Spirited Away (which we've covered) and MenuShade from Nullriver Software (scroll down, it's under their Open Source section).

While I myself am firmly rooted in the 'more on screen = productivity' camp, I am a big fan of enabling users to work the way they need to, and I think this is a nice, quick video (it's only 4:20) to get started with the digital zen art of working clutter-free.