QuickShift is a brand new tool from Growth Beats designed to reduce desktop clutter. Personally, I’m a neat freak so my Mac Desktop is pretty well organized. However, my wonderful wife’s Desktop has dozens, perhaps hundreds, of files scattered everywhere. Looking at her MacBook screen makes my head hurt — especially when she’s having a technical problem and calls for her hubby’s assistance.
If you’re like my wife, QuickShift could make your life much easier. The app will automatically launch each time you log-in. When you first launch QuickShift, you’ll be prompted to choose (or create) a Home folder for storing files. Next, you must add folders to use the tool effectively. The easiest way is to use the Add Folder option, which is the first item in the grid (it appears when you haven’t selected any item to move or copy).
(Why are you asked to select the Home folder? Apple’s guidelines are designed to prevent misuse by restricting access to files and folders. The scope of access is manually decided by the user. So QuickShift asks you to choose the scope of files and folders under which it should operate.)
The app automatically finds any hard drives and adds them to the most used folders grid. When a new external drive is detected, QuickShift notifies you and allows to choose whether to show it in the app’s workflow.
Once you have everything set up, QuickShift allows instance access to your most used folders via the status bar, a hot key, and/or the Services menu. You drag and drop files to the tool, then move or copy them as you need. You can create folders, subfolders, and hierarchies and organize them as you wish. You can even set up folder hierarchies with one line text.
If you’re really lazy, QuickShift provides a “lazy mode” so you don’t have to drop and drop files to move and/or copy them. Just use the hot key. (QuickShift automatically implements Command/1 as the hot key. However, you can change this.)
One “power feature” of QuickShift is its ability to create a powerful hierarchy by typing, for example, Projects/Customers/CustomerA/Invoices/ . In such a scenario, the tool will move or copy the invoice to the invoices folder. If Customer A is a new customer and the folders aren’t created, QuickShift will create a Customer A folder and an invoices folder and move your invoice file inside it.
You’ll have to rethink your workflow habits a bit with QuickShift. This video might help. QuickShift is available at the Mac App Store for $2.99. It requires Mac OS X Yosemite or El Capitan.
