My Use for Finder Colors and Smart Folders!

In the Mac OS, Finder colors especially get a bad rap. They are often totally ignored as an archaic and useless feature. I thought so, until I discovered how well they work with Smart Folders!

So here's my problem: one of the things I like to do is save interesting news articles and other things from the web as PDFs, something that I love is so easy to do on the Mac. So I have a huge folder of these that I keep on my hard drive. Now I don't have time to read all these right when I get them, so I needed a tagging system with which I could mark the articles for later perusal. I also wanted to keep them all in the same big folder.

And here's my solution: I tag the articles I haven't read yet Green (using the Finder colors). I then have a Smart Folder set up to find all files marked in Green. So then whenever I have some spare time, I can work my way through this folder. Another great feature is that in the Finder (or in my case Path Finder) when you remove the label from a file in a Smart Folder, it disappears from the folder immediately, so in my case it updates my "to read" in real-time.

This can be applied to numerous other things as well. I'm a student right now so let's say I'm working on a big project and I have a bunch of different files scattered all over my hard drive. I can mark any file that has to do with that project with a certain color and then put a Smart Folder somewhere, like on the Desktop for example) and "bam!" it's right there. So give this a shot and give the Finder colors a chance!

Where has the MacUser podcast gone?

Unless my iTunes podcast list is broken, I haven't gotten a new MacUser podcast since June 13th. Now for me, two months is simply too long to go without hearing from Dan, Derik, and the rest of the crew.
This is one of my favorite Mac podcasts, right along with MacBreak Weekly. I love how it's basically a bunch of Mac geeks sitting around talking about Macs (and other interesting tangents that come up).
Ironically, I actually discovered it, as well as many other great Mac podcasts, while I was in China last Fall and Winter. For different reasons I had to travel all the way across Beijing (where I was living) and it was fantastic to listen to on the Beijing subway (or 北京地铁 for all you Chinese speakers out there).
Hopefully they'll get another one out soon, come on guys!