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Fresh is a brand new application for OS X that is essentially a file management tool. What it does is take every file that you have interacted with, and shows it in a list. If you edit a Word file, download a file, save an e-mail attachment, take a screenshot, etc., it will show up, newest first, in Fresh’s top green “Recently Created” panel. In everyday computer use, this isn’t much help. But when you’re working on a project, it can be a huge time saver. All of your recently used files will show up in the Fresh window. If they apply to your project, you can drag them down to the “Cooler,” a second window that contains files you choose.

The huge advantage to Fresh over using the Finder is that it is extremely out of the way. When not the main application, Fresh shows a small translucent black tab on the side of your screen that you can drag things to. I decided to drag this down and into the corner of my screen, so now, when I click in the bottom right hand corner of my screen, up pops Fresh. If I’m working on a website, I can have Fresh pop up with all the screenshots, PSDs, HTML files, and CSS files I’ve recently used, plus anything else I’ve put into the cooler. As soon as I choose a file, Fresh is gone, out of my way.

I think I like the description Fresh’s developers give most: “The ‘Cooler’ on the bottom is a like a shelf where you can put things for storage. [... It is] sort of like your desktop—with two important distinctions. One is that the files listed in the cooler can be anywhere on your computer. The other is that this cooler features an ‘autoclean’ function—it automatically throws out items that overflow. This means that you don’t have to worry about cluttering up the cooler with too many items.”

Fresh’s last big feature is the ability to tag files and search through by tag, though the search feature only searches tags, and not file titles. There’s really only one other thing I don’t like about Fresh; it runs with an icon in the dock, something I feel an application like this shouldn’t do. I would prefer options for a menu bar item or nothing at all.

A file organizer that I don’t have to maintain, that doesn’t get in my way, and that has all the files I need without any setup. I’m sold! Fresh costs $9 USD, but is currently (as of Thursday, Feb. 19th) available for free when you do the latest nanoMission on MacHeist.

Product [Fresh]