Tidy (V2.0, June 2007) - Tidy up the icons in the Finder
In the Finder there's a command "Clean up", which can be used to position the icons of a Finder
window (in Icon view) in a regular grid. But the distance between the icons is very large under
Mac OS X, much larger than under classic MacOS. Under Mac OS X 10.3
(Panther) the distance is even larger than under Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar), which makes
this feature often almost useless because of the waste of space.
The application Tidy will solve these problems. Tidy will also tidy up the icons, like the Finder, but it is much more powerful. With Tidy you can configure the horizontal and vertical distance between the icons in a wide range. Also there are several different grids, you can select how many columns of icons will be used. You can even move all sub folders to the top followed by all other icons, so all folder can be reached more easily (no more searching for a certain folder which is burried in tons of other files).
Attention: Unfortunately, the Finder has several nasty bugs and limitations which affect Tidy. The Finder refuses to rearrange icons which are located inside the "FileVault". So if you're using the "FileVault" of Mac OS X, Tidy might be of no use because none of the files in your home directory can be rearranged. When you're not using the FileVault, there's no problem with the files in your home directory.
Answers to frequently askes questions and many hints can be found in the FAQ.
Shareware
Tidy is Shareware and costs only €8 or $8. You can buy a licence for Tidy online.Download
| Program | Version | Status | Language | Download |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tidy (for Mac OS X 10.4.x and newer) | 2.0.1 | Shareware | German, English | Tidy2.01.zip (216K) |
| Tidy (for Mac OS X) | 1.1 | Shareware | English | tidy.sit (350K) |
| Tidy (for Mac OS X) | 1.1 | Shareware | French (Translation by Jean-Jacques Cortes) |
tidy_french.sit (350K) |
History
New in V2.0.1 (July 2007)
- French translation added, thanks to Jean-Jacques Cortes.
- The vertical distance can be set to larger values to make it possible that even large icons (128x128) can be aligned without overlapping.
- Fixed an issue where the Finder could have moved the very first icon slightly down (did only occur with certain icon sizes).
New in V2.0 (June 2007)
- Added a second mode where Tidy will only arrange the icons of the top Finder window.
- Tidy is now completely rewritten as Cocoa application and is now Universal Binary (its running natively on PowerPC and Intel Macs).
New in V1.1
- A new option now allows to clean up the icons without resorting them. The icons will be only aligned to the grid. The order and position of icons which are already aligned won't be affected in this case.