How to attach a note to an application?

[krs]

I would like to attach a brief note to many of the applications in my application folder.

Something like a stickie where I can enter a few words what the application is good for and/or how I use it.

I thought I could somehow associate Mac stickies with each application in the application folder, but can't figure out how - assuming of course that is possible.
Or is there aother way to include a note that I can read just glancing down the apps listed in the App folder?

 

[IWT]

Yes, you can do this - and I tested it with an app I very rarely use - just in case, you know

Go into Applications and from there, use File > New Folder.

Say your app is called (as mine is) Clean Text app. Name the Folder "Clean Text". Then drag the app into that Folder. You will be asked for your Admin PW.

The app is now in that Folder, to which you can add what you like. It does not affect the app which can be launched in the usual way or by using Spotlight (KB shortcut = Cmd + Spacebar) and it works fine.

In fact, quite a lot of third party apps (Roxio Titanium for example) download the app in a Folder wherein lie Read-Me files and similar extras.

Just an idea.

Ian

 

[krs]

Thanks for the idea, Ian, but that is not really what I was after.

What you suggest will definitely work, as you said many apps come that way with a ReadMe file in the folder with the app, but what I'm after is what I posted in my last sentence in the original post: "to include a note that I can read just glancing down the apps listed in the App folder"

I don't want to have to open a folder just to see what the app does., I suppose I could add text to the name of the folder, eg call the folder in your example "Clean Text - Cleans up Text automatically but doesn't work with Libre Office or Pages" (I just made that up).
But that is a bit of a 'work-around'

Along those lines...some apps allow one to add additional text to the name of the app, like for Ramber I can add (RAM Testing) and that seems to work fine; some other apps don't allow that - any idea why?
And what are the potential downsides of adding a short description if allowed? That would help a little bit.

I have now started to just make a separate list as just a text file, grouping application by function and then listing the pros and cons.

BTW - What brought that up is that there seem to be more and more apps that are one trick ponies. And quite a few have names that don't relate to the apps functionality. So if I don't use them regularly, I don't remember exactly what they do and how good their functionality is.

I suppose within limits, I could add a brief description as part of the folder name

 

[IWT]

I suppose within limits, I could add a brief description as part of the folder name

Yes, that would work. I'm sorry I didn't quite catch on as to what you wanted; particularly I should have recognised that you wanted to open Applications and have to do no more than glance down the list, without opening Folders.

And maybe, I was thinking of the odd one or two, rather than a more substantial number.

Your own suggestion (quoted above) might be the way. But other members may chime in with more useful ideas

Ian

 

[pigoo3]

Hey krs...not sure if this is something that would work for you:

- right-click an app icon
- choose "Get Info"
- in the info window you will see a section for "comments"

In this comments section you could add the notes you mentioned.

- Nick

 

[IWT]

Clever idea, Nick. But you; doesn't that mean that krs had to do a Get Info on every app in order to see these comments?

He said: " include a note that I can read just glancing down the apps listed in the App folder"

Ian

 

[Slydude]

Clever idea, Nick. But you; doesn't that mean that krs had to do a Get Info on every app in order to see these comments?

He said: " include a note that I can read just glancing down the apps listed in the App folder"

Ian

No, it doesn't mean that at all. When I read this initially, I thought the same thing you did so I didn't suggest it. It turns out he doesn't have to do Get Info on each app to make use of the Comments field. After reading Charlie's post I had a brain fart. Read on.

Here's something I just tried that's a modification of the procedure Charlie suggested:
1, Perform a Get Info command on an app and enter the Comments area.
2. In the Comments section enter any notes that you think would be helpful. I separated the search terms by commas but that may not be necessary. I just figured since iTunes allows that and seems to use it correctly the Finder probably did as well.

Complete steps 1 and 2 for each app that needs a reminder. You will only have to do this once for each app unless you change the information.

To make use of the comments when you have entered simply open your Applications folder in a Finder window and type the search term you are looking for. The window will update to show only those apps which meet your search terms. If this is a search you will perform regularly I think it could be saved as a Smart Search so that the criteria isn't manually re-entered in the search field.

In very limited testing I'm pretty sure this works as described. I tested it by tagging MalwareBytes as a video editor and the search function put it in the results of video editors on my Mac. I tried a Spotlight search but it did not treat Malwarebytes as a video editor so it may not be reading the Comments field accurately.

Edit 2: I'm not sure if there's a limit to the number of characters in the Comments field. Just as a guess I'd expect it to be several hundred. This is probably sufficient if the terms are chosen carefully.

 

[pm-r]

Clever idea, Nick. But you; doesn't that mean that krs had to do a Get Info on every app in order to see these comments?

Or what about just putting a screen shot of the important part of the completed Get Info window with the comments added???


- Patrick
======

 

[pigoo3]

Clever idea, Nick. But you; doesn't that mean that krs had to do a Get Info on every app in order to see these comments?

He said: " include a note that I can read just glancing down the apps listed in the App folder"

I was thinking that if each app of interest was unique in some way...then each app would require a unique comment.

If a bunch of similar apps (similar function) were able to be placed in the same folder (and a single note would suffice for all apps)...then a single note for all of the apps (instead of a comment for each app in the get info area)...would make more sense.

- Nick

 

[Slydude]

@Patrick Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean but I don't see how that helps things out. Are you suggesting filling out the Comments section, taking a screenshot of that, then storing those in a folder/document somewhere?

If you have to fill out the Comments section anyway then why not use the search method I suggested above?

 

[krs]

Lots of good ideas - thank-you

Let me explain the problem I'm trying to solve a bit better.

Over the years I have ended up with a quite large selection of apps in my app folder, many of which I found through discussion groups like these or searching via google.
Often an app was found and used for a very specific task, and often that app would do that task well but nothing else that I wanted to do relateed to that functionality

I have quite a number of "Image processing apps", so
To correct camera distortion of an image I bought Adobe Photoshop Elements - that application does a lot more, but too much of a learning curve so I don't use the other functionality
To enhance certain images with HDR, I bought two different HDR programs - depending on the image, one works better than the other one
To quickly change the size of a whole lot of images in a folder, I got photodrop (I think) - that worked very well for that function as well
To edit certain parts of an image I use Seashore which makes it very easy to eliminate or block certain parts of an image
To annotate a single image, change size of one image or sharpness etc. I use Preview
and the list goes on.

I work on images fairly often, so I know which application to use for a specific task, but do other tasks, like video editing less often, so there it would be very useful to be able to show two bits of information against each app.
1. A brief note on the apps basic functionality if it is not obvious from the name of the app itself.
That is info I would like to see when I just open the Application folder, and
2. More detailed information what the app is specifically good for - for instance, I was looking for an app to join to ,avi files. I know I have done that before many times, but that was years ago and I can't remember which app (or apps) would do that.

I like Nick's idea of using the Notes field in "Get Info" - that doesn't require having to authenticate which I needed to do with the folder idea. There I had to authenticate twice for each app, once to create a folder in the Application folder and again to move the app into the folder.
The search slydude suggested works fine as well, as far as I can tell, I just see two potential issues:
a. I can search only in the Application folder, so that is great, but I can't set it up (at least I don't think) to only search in the Get Info Notes field in the Application folder. So I get a lot more search results than I would like, and
b. The general limitation with search on a Mac that the search term has to be an exact match to the term in the notes field. It's not like google where one can have the spelling wrong or use a slightly different word, and still get the right search results. Having the terms visible when scanning the app folder would solve that issue since the brain would decide that image join, image merge, image append, image add could all be the same functionality whereas a mechanical search would not.

Hope that clarifies what I'm after a bit.

 

[Slydude]

@krs I did a bit more testing to see if I could answer the question about specifically searching the Comments field.

As I mentioned before I used the comments field to tag MalwareBytes as a video editor as part of the test. That's so outrageous I figured I'd know immediately if the search functions did/didn't work correctly. Here's what I've noticed:

1. Entering a term in the search field of a Finder window works but doesn't confine itself to the Comment field. The result is that if you use a generic term like editing it not only returns the files I tagged with the word editing in comments but also returned other things with editing in the title, read me, etc. If I used specific enough terms it returned only the files I tagged.

2. I tried to use the smart search function because it does have the ability to search only the comments field but also confine the search to applications. That ability should ignore things like read me files. This did not work but should have. I think they use the same search capabilities that the Finder search uses. Perhaps I need to wait for drive indexing to take place.

3. Spotlight does not work well for this task and returns even more extraneous results.