A fresh face in town, Fresh lets you access your most recently accessed items. Consider it a better way to access your recent items menu in OS X. Of course there’s more to this than just recent items, so let’s dig in…
The UI features two large banners, or shelves if you will. The top banner, a light yellowish green in colour, features all your recently accessed items. It will show you any documents you may have created, edited, or saved. This includes web pages, word documents, PSDs, and what have you. Doesn’t matter where you saved them, or what you saved them with. Thumbnail previews of the documents give you a good idea of what documents are on the shelf. You can also quick look any item to check what it contains.
You can of course customise this recent menu. In the preferences, three tabs provide ways to exclude items. You can exclude items saved in folders, of certain extensions, as well as manually add certain files to the list.
The second shelf, a darker bluish green hue, is called the cooler. You manually drag and drop files on here, for easy access. You don’t have to delete items, as old ones automatically move out. The number of items are limited by the width of your screen. My 1680 pixel wide desktop can hold 11 items. The items themselves move down below the bar and there’s no intuitive way to access them.
Fresh also features a very out of place tagging system. I don’t know why they’ve done this, but the half hearted tagging attempt is just totally deviating from the main purpose of Fresh. You drag files to the tag counter at the edge of your screen from where you can add OpenMeta tags to any file. Badly implemented, and pointless. At least it stays out of the way.
At the end of the day Fresh is a very useful app, one that will have a place in my global shortcuts for some time to come. Try it, you just might like it. Fresh comes at a very tasty price of $9, and the best part is you can get it for free if you solve the latest MacHeist puzzle.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
You don’t have to solve the Macheist puzzle. You get the app free just by logging in/ signing up.
The application is utterly worthless attempt to fix a problem that does not exist. Finder already gives you this functionality be default. It’s called ‘Smart Folders’.
I’ve been trying it for a few hours and it looks pretty nice. I’m not a Smart Folder expert, so I don’t know if SpookyET’s observation is accurate, but for me the ability to easily omit certain files and folders from the “fresh” list is key — I tried to get Fresh-like functionality by creating a Smart Folder with “last opened date within last 1 day” and got a bunch of junk in there I wouldn’t want to see, with no obvious way to hide it.
Secret Inka trick to achieve the same without extra software:
Open a Finder window, look at the left column, under “Search For” select “Today” or Yesterday or last week. This will show you not only files and apps that were changed in the time frame but also files that were simply opened.
I don’t get how you’d pay money for this.
The secret Inka trick is well known to man. It works for most part, but I assure you that fresh is a much better experience than that. It’s got the permanent shelf, the global shortcut, quicklook, shows up in expose, large file previews. Besides, you can get it for free from Macheist…