This is a guest post from my friend Rico, another Indie Mac developer over at Kitestack Software who has just released version 1.0 of his app DesktopShelves.
Thanks Antonin for giving me the opportunity to introduce DesktopShelves to your readers!
DesktopShelves is an app that lets you organize your Mac’s desktop. If you have what it feels like a million files cluttering up your desktop and cleaning up means creating a folder called “Stuff” and putting everything inside, DesktopShelves is an app for you.
DesktopShelves does exactly what the name suggests: it puts shelves on your desktop. A shelf the size of 5 regular desktop icons holds 20 files. That is possible, because items on a shelf are slightly rotated like books on a real shelf. In contrast to a shelf made out of metal and wood, a desktop shelf has a nice Cover Flow-like effect to zoom in to the file under the cursor to make it easy to find the file you are looking for.
You can open any folder on your Mac as a shelf on the desktop. Let’s say you are working on a project for a client. In Finder, you can just right-click the project folder and open it as a shelf. This way you will have access to all files right from the desktop. There’s also a hotkey to bring the shelves on top of all other open windows.
Getting files on and off shelves works via drag & drop. You can, for example, drag and drop a file from a shelf directly into Mail.app and send it as an attachment. If you right-click (or control-click) and drag a text file away from a shelf it will insert the actual contents of that file. This lets you keep a shelf with text snippets or email templates.
To take this one step further, you can also select text in an application such as Safari and drop it directly on a shelf. There it will automatically create a new file with that text selection for you.
DesktopShelves comes as a 14 day demo version with all features enabled. After that you can purchase a license for $15. You can download DesktopShelves from the Kitestack website. Here is a link to the DesktopShelves demo video.
Feedback and suggestions are always welcome!
Cheers, Rico (Kitestack Software)
