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.