775: File Automation with Hazel and DEVONthink
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Welcome to MacPal Users. I'm David Sparks and joined by your friend of mine, Stephen Hackett. Hey, Stephen. Hey, David. How are you? Good. Good. We are going to be busy this week. As we approach the end of the year, we've got some pretty good topics lined up, if I don't say so myself. Yeah. But before we get started, it's the final call for relay membership.

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Today on More Power Users, I printed an iPhone stand and I can't wait to talk about it. It's kind of cool. I noticed the verb you used. You said printed. I can't wait to hear what you've done. Yeah, I printed. And also it's triggering a major change in me and my iPhone relationship that I'll explain further later in More Power Users. How's that for a tease? That's pretty good. How's that? That's a good tease.

But today we're talking about file automation. It's a topic that comes off and on over the years on the show. Recently, Hazel got a nice big update, and it's one of the big apps in this space. But I thought that it would be more fun to kind of take this on holistically and just talk about the concept of file automation, why it works, where it doesn't work, and share some of our favorite tools for pulling it off.

Yeah, it's something, you know, when we talk about automation, a lot of people, you know, rightfully think of, oh, you know, I'm dealing with that in my email or maybe my smart home. But, you know, a lot of us deal with a lot of just a lot of files and having systems to help us manage them and sort them and store them can really be very helpful. You know, I think I think about my kids, you know, they're doing a lot of stuff on, you

Google Drive at school, right? They're not shoving around a bunch of Word documents maybe like we did. But we still have a lot of things in our lives that we got to contend with. And so it's an important part of automation. And I think one that hopefully we're going to explore and helps people out today. Yeah. I mean, when I used to speak, because I used to do a lot of speaking to lawyers back when I was one.

But there's a big convention usually in Chicago called the American Bar Association Tech Show where they, you know, it's kind of like ground zero for legal nerds. And there was always so many people there that were selling very overpriced, underperforming, you know, file automation products.

you know, snake oil. And they had these systems where you're, you'd have to pay your staff to go for a week to learn how to run it and all that. Well, me with my little Mac, I would get up in this and explain to people how I did the whole thing with my Mac and a couple applications. And that was always one of the most popular talks I would give because lawyers of course have a lot of documents and they really need automation.

but this applies to your home too. Like just, you know, making sure the gas bill gets into the right place. And, um,

All of this is very possible. Like Stephen said, I think this is an area of automation that you may buy into for people who don't want automation for anything else. People who are like, shortcuts, no thank you. I'm not interested in all that stuff. But if I could tell you there's a way with your Mac to make sure your gas bill gets put in the right folder without you having to drag it over, that may get your interest. And that's what we're talking to today.

Yeah, that's right. And what's great about this, we're talking about Hazel and Devon Think, two great applications that really stand out on the Mac. We talk about other types of automations. You just mentioned shortcuts. Shortcuts is across Apple's various platforms. And even on the iPhone and iPad, it does things that it can't do on the Mac and vice versa. But I think a lot of us are very document-heavy users.

at our Macs. I know I certainly am. I think that's true for a lot of listeners. And so these are apps that really take advantage of what makes the Mac great and really can make it sing.

Yeah, this is definitely, in my opinion, something you want to tackle with your Mac. Now, I will always hear from somebody that's pulling it off with iPad and maybe some shortcuts, you know, file name based rules or something like that. But it is quite difficult. You're really rowing up. You can't row uphill, I guess. Exactly. Rowing against the current. There we go. There you go.

Well, I guess you could row uphill if you were really strong. Yeah. Either way, my point is this really works best on the Mac. You can do it on some of the other platforms. We're not even going to get into that. I mean, one of the reasons why I always rail against the iPad file system is because things like this just are so difficult on it.

And so we're going to be talking primarily on Mac today. I wanted to kind of just put that out there to begin with. And you need to like just give some thought to the system you want to use. And I'd recommend listening to the whole episode because we were talking about two major platforms, but we also have some other stuff sprinkled in. So hopefully there's a solution for you no matter where you are on the spectrum. But I can tell you, I've talked a lot about this. I wrote this book paperless years ago.

And I even heard from people at NASA that were reading it. I mean, this is something that anybody can do, whether you're big or small, and it can really kind of simplify your computing life.

Just some ground rules, though. Like, I think that if you're going to start getting into saving any sort of digital document, the preferred file format should be PDF. There's a bunch of others that are candidates for this, like TIFF and some other, or image format, like image or JPEG. But PDF is like, really, this is what it was designed for. And I don't even think we need to, like, debate it. But yeah, PDFs, that's what you want to be doing. The question is, how do you get them?

PDF stories, they've been around a long time and they're going to be around a long time. I do want to highlight that real quick that I have no doubt that PDFs that I save or create today, I'm going to be able to open for a really, really long time. The world goes round. It turns on its axis thanks to PDF in many ways. And it means that you really can't go wrong because

And it lends itself really well to the types of documents and files that we're kind of talking about today, right? It's stuff that I need to save, and I'm kind of wanting them to be read-only for the most part, right? You can edit PDFs, you can get text out of PDFs and that sort of thing. But they really are sort of, I think, the nexus for a lot of these things. Yeah, and just to give a little background, I mean, it was designed by Adobe, right?

And then they open sourced it. It says, you know, they gave it to the world, but there's even a PDF slash a format, which is an art, a special archive format. But I would argue that not only will you be able to read PDF the rest of your life, your great grand grandchildren will probably have a PDF reader. I mean, maybe it's not in vogue back then, you know, when they've got all their space glasses on and everything, but yeah,

But, you know, that's a very good long-term format. And so, you know, the question is how do you get your documents into PDF? It depends on how it comes. A lot of documents come to you as PDFs. I mean, I just got an email this morning that had a PDF attached receipt. So there you go. It's already done for me. Emails always are a question, but on the Mac you've got the print as PDF button.

And at Mac Sparky over the years, I've tried to keep up with it over the years, but I made a keyboard shortcut. If you hold down the command key and hit P twice, it prints as PDF. I'll link the most recent version of it. Apple...

seems to want to change their mind every few years about how that works with an ellipses that they add and remove seemingly randomly. But I've got a little keyboard trick I can share with you so you can print an email. But, you know, print to PDF, you can do manually anywhere on your Mac. So it's easy enough. And then

The other thing that's so easy now is getting physical documents in the PDF. It used to be that you really had to go buy a document scanner, but now the iPhone has such a good camera in it. We have apps like Greg Pierce's Simple Scan that is a simple scanner, for lack of a better word, but also very powerful because it's made by Greg.

Where you could open your mail and just point your phone at it and you've got a PDF. So it's easier than ever to convert to PDF no matter what format you're coming from. And that's all I'm going to say about that. But the next piece of this is document storage for ground rules. Where do you put it?

And this is a real question. I was just talking to a listener over the weekend who was asking me, you know, where does he put it? And the first question there is cloud or local. I mean, do you put it on a cloud database or do you put them in the local? Well, partly that depends on what you're scanning. Like I don't put my taxes into Dropbox, you know, but the, um, I keep them local, but other things you may, you may want the convenience of having them in the cloud so you can access them from your phone, for example.

And we're going to come back to this question later in the show because the other thing is it depends on what software tools you're using. Some software tools kind of lend themselves to one storage location versus another. So we've got to get through that before we can really answer the question.

I think the what the content is, is really how I think about this question. I've got stuff that I just keep in Dropbox. I have other things that go into Devon. Think of other things that are just like locally in my documents folder. And I think that the having things in Dropbox or iCloud Drive, like there's obvious benefit to that. Like, oh, I just am on my phone and I need that receipt or whatever, like that.

That tends to be my default answer is to put it on Dropbox or, you know, if you use iCloud Drive, iCloud Drive. But I do think there are things, I think taxes are a great example of something that, you know, like I just don't think I want that on Dropbox. And maybe that's just a gut feeling that I'm working off of, but that's okay. And these tools, you know, Hazel's, when you get into it in a couple minutes, it's

Hazel's flexible enough that it can manage putting these things different places and storing them in different ways. But I do think content is the deciding factor there. I think that's well said. But you should have a plan, like have an Apple note or something, literally write down your policy. The problem that a lot of people have is they start with that idea saying, OK, taxes here and, you know, non-private stuff over there.

But then they start making other places to put things too. And before you know it, you've got seven or eight different locations. You store documents and you've lost the thread. So treat yourself like a corporation. Make an Apple note or some other document that says this is our policy. Yeah.

Um, certain, these things go on a local drive taxes, the, you know, the recipe for the Colonel seven secret herbs and spices, you know, whatever the things are, you really don't want in the New York times, you put them on your local drive and then everything else goes to this folder or, you know, but just write it out. Don't,

Don't let it balloon because it will happen without you realizing it. And before you know it, you won't trust the system anymore because you won't know where everything is. So that's something you have to figure out. Another general rule I would argue is, and this is a mistake I think a lot of people make when they get started with this, is wherever you put it, don't go crazy with subfolders. Computers are really good at search.

And I would argue a shallower folder organization than you think you need. Like if you've got folders upon folders and you've got folders that don't have anything in it or folders only have, you know, one to five documents in it, then you've gone too far in my opinion. Yep. You know, back out a bit because, you know, think about it when you need this stuff is, um,

is you need to get to it and you need to be able to find it. And if you go down the wrong rabbit hole of folders and you can't find it, but you're sitting at the doctor's office and you got to get something, that's going to be frustrating. So, you know, just think about the folder organization, go shallower than you think you need. Add tags. You know, most of these systems have some sort of tag support. Mac OS has tag support. I would rather have a shallow folder system with tags than a lot of folders. I think that that's a good general rule.

And with that said, we're getting into the meat of the show. We are going to focus today on Hazel and Devon Think, which in our opinions is the two best tools to do this job. Yeah, there are definitely other tools. In fact, I had a flashback when you were talking about what gets stored where.

I used to really wring my hands over that in my Evernote days. Like, oh, when does a PDF get saved in Evernote versus just in my file system? And I think that in a way that...

Tension is as old as time, like where things go, how I store them. I love your advice of writing them down. But yeah, these are two excellent Mac apps for this. There are plenty of others. Apple Notes, right? I've got PDFs that are saved in Apple Notes, like my folder for manuals of stuff, you know, around the house, like that.

oh, I need a part for my dishwasher. What's the model number? Well, I've got the manual, right? Writing Apple Notes. That could be in Dropbox. That could be in Dev and Think. That could be in other places. But in my system, manuals go in notes. And the reason for that is I share that folder of notes with my spouse. And so she can look something up and not need me. So

I think writing it out is good. I think understanding the strengths of these different apps is good. That works for everything. I do that for everything. I just started working on turning OmniFocus into a Kanban tool, and I have a document where I listed out all the categories. You just formalize it, and then you settle in your own brain how it works. But I do that for a lot of things.

All right. Hazel. Hazel's found at noodle soft.com. This is a great app. I want to tell the little story behind it. The guy behind it is a great, you know, single app developer. I've actually had asked him on the show in the past and he's like, no, no, man, I don't, I don't do stuff like that. You know, you know, but you know, it's like, I kind of admire that in a way. You're like, he's not out there like promoting it. He just wants to make it really good.

And it's been around forever. They just came out with version six. I'd say they, but it's really he. And it's just a killer app for document organization and automation. It's like, what if we could take all the tools to organize your documents and make them really easy to use with a token based rule system?

And before I think before Hazel existed, I used to write Apple scripts to do some of this stuff, which you could do. And maybe that's how Hazel started, but it is so much more than that. Now it's kind of awesome. And, and you know,

Talking about somebody who can't self-promote but is going to, I'm going to offer, because I've got field guides on both Hazel and Devon Think. I hope this doesn't sound like I'm talking about these days to sell field guides, but I figured, well, why not, right? So I'm going to put 20% off both of those with the code MPU.

docs, you know, there's no space MPU docs. And I'll add that and we'll put links in the show notes if you want to pursue either one of these. But it is a, Hazel is a dedicated document automation tool. The reason we're covering this one first is because here's a tool that was made exactly for the thing we're talking about today. And the way it works is

It watches a folder that you pointed at and it does things that you tell it to do. So like all automation, there's a trigger and then there's an action. In Hazel's case, it's not looking to see whether you turn the lights on or anything. It's looking to see if a document exists in a specific folder that meets your conditions. So for example, I have a folder called action on my root drive.

And if I put a document in there that has the word Max Barkey expense included in the name, which I add automatically with TextExpander, then it takes the document, it moves it to a specific folder that's on Dropbox that's shared with my accountant.

In the old days, I had it where it emailed it to her as well, but we've changed the process now, so she doesn't want all my emails. But there's just a magic folder on Dropbox. She has access to it, and all my expenses get listed there. So when we get to the end of the year, I don't have to do anything. She's been getting all my expense receipts and everything all year long.

And that's a very simple rule in Hazel. It's like, if the name contains Max Barkey expense, you know, move it to this folder. That's about as basic as you can get with Hazel, but it saves me and her so much time and make sure that all my records are complete. And, and, you know, it's just like, that's a perfect example of a simple implementation of Hazel. And I love it. I think Hazel is, is one of those apps that,

started life like solving a problem. Like how do I do file management? And while it can do very complicated things and you can nest things and have it traverse subfolder, all this stuff, some of the best things I use Hazel for, and I think you do too, or just like simple quality of life things. I guess these are all going to end up in this folder. So someone else has access to them. And as is true with so much automation, like,

Doing that task once is not a big deal. But with something like expenses where, you know, they're coming in every week or, you know, kind of constantly stopping your day to handle them or taking a task and manually repeating it a bunch of times where errors can happen.

It's not good. And so I think that example is a perfect way to describe Hazel. Like I have these things. I need them over here. I need them with these names and it can just do it. So the way it works is it looks for conditions. So in the case I just used, it's looking at that action folder and it's looking to see if there's anything in there that has that magic incantation in the file name.

But that's not just that. It can do almost anything. It can look inside the contents of the folder if it's been OCR'd. It can look at the date of the folder. I mean, there's so many different ways to skin this cat. Although I will say that changing the file name for me is quite often the trigger because it's so reliable. You know, I do the same thing when I download like the gas bill. You know, if it has the word gas bill in it, it goes to a different spot and it just goes through everything.

and sorts those out for you. But that's not all it does. It can, you know, the action isn't just to move it to another folder. It could rename the file, add tags. Like I was mentioning earlier,

that you should have a shallow folder system. For me, I've got a folder called utilities and Hazel can grab the file, move it to the utilities folder and add the Apple Mac OS tag gas bill, you know, and then I've got a way to, you know, further filter down or search it through spotlight. And it's all done for me automatically. All I do is scan it and name it.

Another thing you can do with it is you can have it organize files automatically. Like one of the tools in Hazel I use a lot is organizing into subfolders. We had a thing where a family member had a lot of files that we needed to organize to, you know, fancy, fancy business stuff. Right. And so she gave me this folder and it was just like full of files. So I said,

take every file in this folder and organize it into subfolders based on date by month, and then create a subfolder that says like 2025 or 2024-12. And for anything that was in December and just all put everything that was created in that month into this folder. So I just made one little script and then it took thousands of files and organized them into subfolders by month.

And that, you know, Hazel, that is like easy, easy peasy for Hazel. You mentioned OCR a second ago, and that's one of the really nice additions in version six is that it can, Hazel can read text from files that do not have OCR data. So it, it temporarily will OCR the document, get what it needs and then move on in the action. That's great because it,

A lot of PDFs don't come with OCR information. I think all of them should. I certainly prefer that. But, you know, if you're getting a receipt from, you know, some random place, they may not have their PDF set up to do that. Or you may be trying to move images or something like that. And so that was a bit of a sticking point, I think, for some people with Hazel before. It's like, well, gosh, I got to like OCR this file and then Hazel can deal with it. Hazel can now just do that.

On the fly, which is awesome. Yeah. Well, so this update is really good because it addresses, in my mind, the biggest weakness in Hazel. So Hazel's always had the ability to look into the contents of a file. Like the idea would be, let's return to the gas bill. It looks at a file, and rather than you naming it,

it just looks inside the file and says, Oh, this came from the gas company and it was dated December, 2024. Like there's a date in there. It can do token and pattern matching. So it will look for a date and it will look for the word gas bill and, or maybe the words gas company. Okay. So if it contains, that would be the condition, right? If the file contains the word gas company and,

then find the token with the date in it and rename the file date token dash gas bill. And it has done that for years, but it's been inconsistent. You know, first of all, you have to have it OCR'd.

And then it has to actually find it in there. And depending on like the typography and the way the documents laid out, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. What I will say is like, if you're, if it figures it out on your gas bill this month, it'll probably figure it out in your gas bill next month. But like, if you've got a credit card with a weird font or something, it may not ever find it, you know, and that's got a lot better. That's the, that's the problem he attacked with this new version is,

And it's better. Now my testing is still isn't 100%, but it is a hundred percent. Once it, once it figures out this type of bill, that makes sense. But yeah, that makes the automation even easier, but that's why I've always kind of defaulted. Just when I scan them, I named them and then I know that there's no problem, but wouldn't it be great if I could just scan them and it would go through the inbox and look at each, each of the contents of each one and do the entire job for me.

That's what he's aiming for. Also, you know, there's other things in version six, it's Apple Silicon compliant and a bunch of other stuff he did, but that, you know, Hazel is a document machine and the advantages of it in my mind are that, you know, it's, it's, it's a independent tool made for one purpose. So, um,

you can take Hazel and really customize it to do whatever you want. Like if you want to store your documents to the iCloud, great. If you want to store them to an encrypted database online, you can do that too. If you want to use Apple, you know, built-in system tags, it supports that. And of course it supports all the other automation platforms like keyboard maestro and shortcuts. Like one of the things you can do is you can have it run a shortcut. Once a file satisfies its condition. Like I could say,

Once it sees the Max Sparky expense thing, also, you know, throw up a notification on screen using shortcuts saying, hey, I just filed your expense with Colleen. You know, it's just like stuff like that, right? It does all of that for you.

And the way that he's kind of tapped into this automation renaissance on Mac that it can use the other automation platforms. So all the tools they have, I get those in Hazel as well. It really kind of opens up the floodgates. And Hazel has some cool features that

or kind of beyond the automation stuff. So like one of the things I use is AppSweep. So if I delete an application, it offers to get rid of all the support files. Because on macOS, like if you just drag a .app, you know, from your application to the trash, it may be leaving other stuff on your disk. And sometimes that can be, you know, pretty sizable. And Hazel just, it pops up a little window. It's like, hey, you got rid of, you know, this app.

Let me get rid of these other files and list them there. So you can see what it's going to do. And it can also do some things like automatically delete the trash at a certain time or once it's a certain size. It's really cool. And all that stuff's found in Hazel's preferences. So you can go in there and kind of see these additional things, additional features that it has. Yeah. And you can even like, this is a weird use for it, but you can also use it as an automation trigger on your Mac.

So like, let's say you want some sort of automation to happen that you're, maybe you're running an automation out of shortcuts, but you don't know how to trigger it remotely. Well, you set up a, a folder on your Mac called automation triggers, and then you just say, keep watching that folder. And if a text file called go shows up, then trigger the shortcut. Well, then let's say you're away from your, your Mac and,

And you go into your iCloud folder or your Dropbox folder, whatever this automation folder is located. And you just make a text file and call it go. And your Mac back home will see that that file just showed up and then it'll run your shortcut for you. So you can literally remotely. I mean, you can really go down the rabbit hole with this. But I honestly don't want to focus on that today. The point of the show is document automation. And

And the best practice for this with Hazel, in my opinion, is you get the app, you know, figure out how to make a couple of these things. And then you create like one big target folder on your Mac where all these rules are applied. And then you just have it watch that folder. In my case, there's a folder called action and anything that goes in there.

And Hazel's always watching. And like, I've got a variety of different automations. Some of them look inside the contents of a folder. Some of them look at the document name, but they're always working on it. So like a good example for me is I will, I'll have one that says, look for the name. And rather than put a date in the name when I save the file, because let's say I scan a piece of paper and I just name it gas bill. So look for something that says gas bill in it. Then if you find one with that name, then take,

the current year and month, let's say 2024-12. So add that to the front of the name, then write gas company bill or something like that. Then add a Mac OS tag to it and then put it in the utility folder. And so when I scan something and it's got the proper name, it automatically processes it. As a user, I look at the action folder and anything that's left there, I look as an opportunity for a new Hazel rule.

So I could make, you know, if I see something there, it's like, oh, there's a dentist bill. I don't ever want to file a dentist bill again. So then I say, well, maybe this is what I can automatically pull the name out of, or do I need to name the file and let it do something else? But you just look at that action folder as a source of automation.

And when it's time to do, you know, your weekly business, just add a few more rules every time you go in there. And before long, the thing is empty every time you go in there because Hazel's doing all the work for you. And that's a really simple method. You don't have to spend weeks and weeks working on it. You just build it as you need it. And before you know it, your Mac is just, you know, document management is no longer a thing for you. It just happens.

Can you talk a little bit about having multiple rules looking at a single folder? Like what are some things people should look out for or know about there? There's really no problem. The only issue that you can have is if there is overlap. Like if you have two looking for the name gas bill, the first rule is going to always win because presumably you're going to rename it and send it somewhere else. So the second rule will never see it. Right.

But I have never really had a problem with that. And over the years, they've allowed you to kind of group folders and do other things. You know, he's the system's got a little more smart over the years, but I have like, you know, probably a hundred rules pointed at my action folder.

And no problem at all because they're all looking for different criteria. You can actually do clever things with the ordering. So one of the tasks I have set up is to look at a collection of subfolders and delete files based on how old they are. So this set of folders is actually a local copy of everything Relay publishes. And I have a script that goes and downloads new shows and

and new XML, so like the RSS feed, and saves it locally so I have a copy of everything. But I don't want those XML files to stack up. I don't need like 25 different versions of the RSS feed. I just want the latest version of the RSS feed. And there's a condition you can set on a rule, like if kind is folder, then you can say run rules on folder contents. And so I have that at the top of that

the list of rules for that folder. And it says, okay, Hazel, everything after this, you're doing actually not to the, the, the head folder, but all the sub folders under this. And so the ordering can really unlock the,

some additional things. And without that, I would have had to have, you know, like 35 copies of that rule running on a bunch of different folders. Like that's not sustainable and that's fragile and clunky. And so being able to say, okay, if I'm looking at a folder, run the rules and folder contents and having that at the top of the list. So then it goes through and does everything else to all the sub folders is, is,

It's really a time saver for that particular action for me. Yeah. And that's a whole like category of tricks with Hazel, like cleaning utilities. Same thing as a podcaster. I have source recordings for every show and, you know, we send them to the editor, but I also have a backup. So I've got a bunch of files generated for every episode I make. And, you know, that would fill up your hard drive very quickly because we record in the highest possible fidelity and,

So I've got rules pointed at those recording folders and basically says that there's a file that's over three months old, delete it. And, and,

And so once I send the recording to Jim, if he writes me back and says, ah, something went wrong, I need it again. I've still got it. Yes. But I'm not filling up my drive. And after a few months, they clear out. Another example that I use with Hazel's, I call it the burn bag. Like a lot of times I will make a file that I need to share with somebody and I just want to keep it for a short time. So I move the file to the burn bag after I share it.

And burn bag is exactly what it sounds like. Hazel watches that folder. And once a file gets two months old, it deletes it. So I don't have to think about it again. You know, it's like, okay, I sent that off to JF. He's done with it after two months, it's completely wiped out of the system. And it helps me keep my hard drive down to a rational level.

Yeah, that's both things that I also do. I also do Hazel. You find uses for it, but the entry point and really the purpose is file automation. Now, return to our earlier question about where you put it. With Hazel, the answer is anywhere because you can really just put it anywhere. You can put it on any drive you want, any cloud storage, local storage, but I do recommend you do that systematically and carefully because

And you've got just a ton of options with this application. Yeah. One of the great things that I really appreciate about Hazel, because not all automation systems have this, is the ability to preview which files a rule would affect. So basically you can do like a test run and make sure that things are going to be what you expect, which is awesome. Yeah.

Yeah, so there is a little warning here, and I don't want this to chase you away from Hazel, but you should be aware of it if you're new to it, is you have conditions when you set these rules. Like you say, what if the file is a gas bill or a water bill? Or you could say, what if the file is a gas bill and a water bill, right? So Hazel's going to follow those conditions you give it literally. And if you're not careful and you don't test, right?

There's a possibility you may select a lot more files than you thought you did. And I've done that a couple of times where suddenly the action folder is just empty, you know, and it sent them all to the gas bill folder or something. And that's just because I was sloppy in setting my, my rule up and I didn't pay attention to an and or an, or that's usually what gets me. So, you know, you gotta be smart about it, be careful about it, deliberate, but

Honestly, I haven't done that in years, but that was a growing pain for me as I was learning the app. Yeah. Yeah. I think once you kind of feel confident with it, it's not as necessary, but it is useful when you're building something new. And you can, so if you want to run that test or the preview, it's right within Hazel. You also have the ability, and this is something I really like,

is you can add a note or a description to a rule. So say that you have, you know, your watch folder with a whole bunch of rules in there and you can name them. And I do recommend naming them pretty clearly, like what they actually are doing. But the note and description is also really helpful that if you're going back through and trying to troubleshoot something or see what's going on and you entered a note at time of creation, it can really save your bacon down the road.

Yeah, just assume future you is not going to remember what the heck you were working on today. That's right. Give that person some help. That's right. Hazel also has a log that can be useful. Yeah, this is another great troubleshooting tool. If something maybe didn't work as expected or you have like, oh, this didn't work, it can be very useful. So you can go in there, you can see the log.

And, uh, it gives you detail about what, uh, what happened or more importantly, uh, what didn't happen. And it is, um, uh, not something that I, I use very often. Um, it's under the help menu. Um, it's help, uh, view logs, but it is something that, uh, can be, uh,

a useful thing, but it, but it is a log, right? Like you go in here, like, Oh, this is a lot of, it's a lot of timestamps. There's a lot of stuff in here that, uh, I don't necessarily need, but it can be really useful. So I'm looking at a job that just ran this morning. I can see, okay, this is the rule that was fired at what point this is what happened. And then, um,

done processing. So I got to know that it, that it actually finished. But if you have something that's causing trouble, it will give you detail and can be, can be quite useful. Yeah. Just looking through my Hazel list of folders. I monitor, you know, the action one is the big one, but I've got other things, you know, like screencast files that goes through and does specific things. They're stream deck backups because I, you know, I'm always backing up my stream deck.

it goes and clears out old, old backups. So that doesn't like balloon. Anytime you have a folder that automatically gets files added to it, it's a candidate for Hazel cleaning. I just, you know, I find all sorts of uses for this application. I just love it's it's flexibility. I think that is why. And I know there's a lot of listeners that are probably already have Hazel fully implemented, but it's just, it's just so good for that. And yeah,

It's funny because there's really nothing else like it. Like when I back going, you know, going back to the American bar association days, I built my whole legal filing system on Hazel rules. And there were so many lawyers that would see that and say, I spent $10,000 last year for a file management system that doesn't work this good. Like there were people switching to Mac and,

just to get Hazel to run their file automation because it's just such a big deal. It's cheaper to buy a Mac and use Hazel than to buy some big system that doesn't work. And it's just really great. And people have tried, like there was a guy making an app for PC called Belvedere, which if you're old enough, you get it. But it was like a copy of Hazel for PC. And it just was like, it was a joke. It wasn't nearly the same thing.

So Hazel, there used to be a TV show about a maid named Hazel, and there was a TV show about a butler named Belvedere. Ah, thank you. Thank you for providing the context. Yeah, I realize I should probably explain that one. Anyway, it is one of the gems of the Apple ecosystem. Yep. And if you've ever had any desire to do file management,

This one, along with Devon thing, should be at the top of your list. Yep. And it's just sitting up in the menu bar, always working and always watching. And it's great. It's just doing stuff for me all the time. And that's what my computer should do. That's what makes computers good, when they take jobs on for us. And the app's been around longer than a decade. The developer has a model where he's able to make a living just working on it.

And he's always working on it. You know, we just cut a new version. So you can feel confident in the time you spend learning the app and purchasing it.

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So next, let's talk about Devonthink, which I think some people would think, well, Stephen and David, Devonthink is a database program. How are you, you know, what are you doing with automation here? So I do think it is important to kind of start this with some comparing, contrasting with Hazel, because I'll be honest, I do very little automation stuff.

In Devon Think, I mostly use it as a database, but it has a lot of automation tools built in. Yeah, what people don't know is the Devon Think team is relatively small, and one of the primary developers behind it loves, loves, loves automation. And that's why Devon Think has always been so good at automation stuff.

And it's basically got kind of Hazel built in where there's a ton of rules-based automation where it can look at a portion of the database and apply rules just like we were talking about with Hazel. They're slightly different, but very similar. You know, some of the things it does are, like Dev and Think always OCRs a file when it imports it. So that gives it a bit of an advantage with the internal, like,

contained text-based automation that hazel sometimes struggles with and but dev and think is a very powerful automation tool that and that's the funny thing for me is people use dev and think like you and they don't even realize that they've got this massive tool belt hanging on the wall that they need that they haven't even picked up yeah it's uh

It was eye-opening to me going through and preparing for this, some of the things that it can do. I do kind of want to take a sidebar for a second and talk about, I think, what a lot of people view as a fundamental difference between the two is that Hazel is working and things are in Finder, right? You're moving things between folders, you're renaming things, you're filing them, you're deleting them. Whereas Dev & Think, things are in the Dev & Think folder.

universe right and we can talk in a second about uh how you create and organize databases uh but that is a fundamental difference right you're working within the application and not just finder yeah and i think that's like one of the keys to choosing which tool you use i believe both of these apps have demonstration periods but the um

In Dev & Think, I put Dev & Think documents in the Dev & Think database. It can index documents outside the database, but I find it more convenient to have everything in one place. And with Hazel, like you said, it's just the file system. And that does impact the availability of the files for you if you're not in Dev & Think application. I really think the reason that we put both apps in the show is because I think they both have pluses and minuses and

Both of them are excellent answers to the question of document automation, but they're different. Should we talk about databases? Yeah, a little bit. A little bit, yeah. This is going to be a whole rabbit hole. But the way I think, the way to think about it is a database can be an area. So you mentioned in the notes work, research, personal. Databases are collections of related information.

files and folders. They can be organized and subgrouped and tagged all within those. But I generally agree that a database for an area makes a lot of sense. So if you're talking about home use, you know, you could have a database maybe like for each year of finances, or you could have a database for, you know, business documents and personal documents. I don't think you have to go in and actually wouldn't recommend going in and like

making 15 different databases that are really finely sliced. Kind of like what you said earlier, like you can get carried away with subfolders in the finder and you're like down, down, down, down, down. I think big sort of areas is the way to think about this. Yeah. As an example, I have one because I run both of these at once because I write about them and I just want to be up to date. And I have one called personal records, right? And any personal record gets thrown in there.

And my experience with Dev and Think is it's not the same as Hazel, but in some ways it's more automated. Like, because as soon as I put it in a personal records database, Dev and Think is going to learn a ton about that document. You know, it's going to OCR it. It's going to have metadata I can search.

Dev and Think was using the term artificial intelligence and search long, long before everybody else was. Long before it was something you said to juice your stock, right? So it is a very powerful search engine. In fact, one of the ways you could use Dev and Think, if somebody came to me and said, look, I don't want to do any of this stuff. I don't want to write rules. I just want it to be easier to find my documents online.

I would say by Dev and think make a database called personal records, dump everything there. Yeah. Just dump it in there and use the search bar and you'd be shocked how much you can find and how good it is. You know? Yes. Cause that, that's something you can do with them. I think you really can't do with Hazel, right? It, it does a ton of work under the covers without you touching anything. Oh, absolutely. And the search and Dev and think is like next level. It does live and partial matches as you type and,

And you can set the scope of the search really easily. So if I'm drilled all the way down into a collection inside of a database and I

Like, oh, it's not there. I can just back up a level and search all of Dev and Think from a single place. And so you can really get specific with where you're searching. Again, that's something you can do in Finder, but I think the Finder team could take a lesson from Dev and Think on how to make that easy. And honestly, like my use of Dev and Think is I put a bunch of things in there, they get OCR'd, and then I search. I mean, I have databases and I have subfolders and all that, but...

I stopped at a certain level. I basically go like one level down in terms of structure. And then after that it's search and the search is really good. And look, I've got, uh, you know, something like, I don't even know. I'm trying to find the number. I mean, it's, it's over a hundred thousand items in, uh, 106,000 items in Devon think, uh,

And the search is so fast. Like you are not going to slow this thing down. You're not going to bog it down. You can throw a ton of stuff in here and it's, it's very performant. Yeah. There's a, um, a great writer, um, uh, Ann Laurie Lecomte. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing right. She's a neuroscientist and she's going to be on a future episode of the focus podcast. But, uh,

She was famous for talking about people who organize documents with different paradigms. And one of them is gardeners and one of them is architects. And I was thinking about one of the ways you could distinguish these two apps is Hazel is for architects and Devonthink is for gardeners. Because with Devonthink, you throw it in and you kind of just organically go through it. With Hazel, you create a structure and

And then you create rules that, that build the building according to your structure. And like one of the, the distinctions I was thinking about this before we recorded is I think if you were just using documents yourself, Devin thing could make a lot of sense for that because it's a database on your system that you control. You've got that amazing search. It doesn't take a lot of work from you. Like the example is your Mac database. I mean, you've got this massive database of Apple resources, right?

that you go through and query it through the AI super search. And you don't spend a lot of time architecting it. You garden through it. Whereas my CPA thing, I want her to see a specific group of files in a specific folder. And that's an architect kind of problem. And that is kind of a nice way to distinguish the apps.

Yeah. I think that makes a, I think that makes a lot of sense. I really like that. Um, I got a link to her YouTube in the show notes. People can, people can check that out. Really nice lady. And, uh, like I said, she, uh, just a promo at some point in the future, we've already recorded it. I just don't know when it releases. So yeah, no, I got the sense you were, you were in that in between time. Um,

I also have in the show notes a blog post from the Devon Technologies folks about some of the document automation tools in here. They've got rules. They've got batch processes, which is really nice. Yeah, these guys aren't playing. No, they're not. They showed up. And people use DevonThing to run entire businesses out of and –

Like both of these tools are super powerful enough to do this job and more. Yeah. For me, what stands out and Devin think is the scripting their built in script library is the most comprehensive. I think that ships with any third party app on the Mac. It is, there are hundreds of things in here and you can, um,

I mean, just if you go in the script menu, just so many, and you can, you can download more and add more. One that I use all the time because most of what I have in Dev and Think is not files, but it's web pages that I've scraped from the internet through the Dev and Think Safari plugin. Yeah. And they just have this script called rename to web page title. And so it goes into the HTML, it pulls the page title and makes that the document title and

This has saved me so much time over the years because a lot of web pages don't have good titles, you know, and that drives me bananas. And when you're, when you're looking at a large collection of data, you're,

renaming things can really be huge. And so also in the rename folder, there's rename to subjects. If you pulled in emails, it will just rename the document with the subject. You can append text, change case. And if you're really brave, you can use regex to rename your files. That's not my cup of tea. Every time I've gotten near regex, things explode. But if you're into that, also support it.

Well, I will tell you one thing, just as a little side note. Look at ChatGPT. ChatGPT has revolutionized my use of regex. Ooh, I bet. Yeah, so for folks that are scratching their heads saying, what are they talking about? Regular expressions is like a programming language that does pattern matching in words. So if you make documents and work with words, it can be quite useful. Regex has the ability to pattern match

Like show me anything that ends in the word ACKET without the H and it will generate the regex formula and you can plug it in somewhere. But it actually, ChatGPT is your friend for that kind of stuff. Yeah. No, that's good. It's very funny to me that regex and some reason AppleScript is the one that always makes me laugh. It's like AppleScript started in like system seven something like in the nineties and like ChatGPT is writing AppleScript for people. Like what a world we live in. Yeah. Yeah.

Uh, but it's, it's great. And the scripting and Devin think means that if, if one of the built-in ones doesn't quite do what you want, uh,

or you want something specific, you can do it. And both of these apps, both Devon and Hazel have really great communities around them of people using it, talking about it in the forums and that sort of place places where if you have a question, you're going to be able to find an answer. And,

You know, I used to not think about that very much in terms of like what tools I chose, but I've thought about it a lot more over the years. Like it's actually really nice to use an application. I'll use Devon, take an example. I think drafts is another good example of this that has a really strong community base around it. That is, you know, that community can inspire the developer for new features, but also help users. I think that's great. I think both of these apps are good examples of it.

Yeah, exactly. And, you know, one of the things I hear about whenever this topic comes up is people say, well, the thing I don't like about Devon think is the database. Like I, I don't want to put my personal records in that database because what if I am at the hospital and I need to access something and it's in the database, I would say, well, there's a couple of things. First of all, is they do have mobile apps, you know, and it does sync with them. Although the way it syncs obviously does not necessarily put every one of your files on your,

on your device, just like it wouldn't if you're using an iCloud sync. So you've still got to download the file. And because the automation rules are so powerful, you can also have it export documents to an external folder. So like going back to my accountant example, I can have it in addition to filing, sorting, tagging, doing whatever in Devon think it could spit a copy out to that Dropbox folder. So,

You just got to be a little intentional about it. Whereas with Hazel, you're dealing straight into the file system. So you've got the advantages of it just being there. With Devon, I think you've got to think that through a little bit. But six of one, a half dozen or another. These tools, I really want people listening to know

I'm not picking a favorite here. I just want you to understand there's some differences and you got to figure out what works for you. Honestly, if someone told me I could, cause I run them both because of who I am and what I do. I only had to run one. I hate to say this, but I think it'd be Devin thing. You know, I hate to say this cause I love Hazel too, but yeah.

But just the automation in Dev and Think is really nice. Well, thankfully, I don't think it's going to come down to that. I think you're safe. Yeah, exactly. I kind of like having both running. Yeah. I don't mind the database at all. I do have Dev and Think set up on my iPhone and iPad, and we can talk more about syncing in a second. But in Finder, those databases are just files in Finder, and you can right-click and go, I don't recommend this. I don't think Dev and Think recommends this. But yeah.

Your stuff is down there. It's not like it's turned into some weird blob of data you can't get out. Exportable. Yes. But like Hazel, Devon Think's been around a long time. And say something were to happen to the company, the application is still going to run. It has excellent export tools. And so I don't worry about that. This is not something like...

We mentioned Evernote earlier where that was an issue in Evernote because their export tools weren't very good. You know, if I've got a bunch of markdown in Dev and Think, I just export it and I get markdown files, right? Or HTML files or PDFs, whatever I put in, I can get out. And that is enough for me. Yeah. And I guess I should disclose that on occasion, Dev and Think has sponsored my blog. So same, take that with what it is. But yeah,

But I just, because it's not just like this problem that I solve with Dev and Think, it's also my depository of files and documents. Like as much as I like Obsidian and I know it does file stuff, Dev and Think's better at it, you know? Yeah. Another advantage of using Dev and Think for these types of records is if you're like me and you like to link to things, you can link to the folders in Dev and Think and the files in Dev and Think.

In the Finder, you really can't. I mean, there's kind of workarounds, but they're very rickety. Yeah. Or you got to use an app like Hook or something like that. Yeah, exactly. But with Devon Think, you can create a link. So if you like to have contextual computing type links to all the files and things related to a specific project,

It's easy for me in OmniFocus to have a Dev & Think link that just takes me to the related documents. And when I put them into iCloud, I don't get that without some hoops being jumped through. Should we talk about Sync for a second? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Let's do it. Yeah. So in the Dev and Think preferences on the Mac, there's a, first of all, like go explore them because there are so many things in here. Um, like you can set up your own basically like internal wiki in Dev and Think and connect files and documents and all sorts of things. Um,

But the last one is sync. And you can sync with Dropbox, which is what I do, but you can also sync with iCloud or WebDAV or just a local sync store on your machine. And you can select what databases you want synced. And so I've got, I think, about 10 or 11 databases. I sync them all, but I wouldn't have to. And in there, I can go see...

the status of them. And if you're only using this on the Mac, you don't necessarily have to set up sync. If you just want things locally on your machine, the database is a file on in Finder, so it can be backed up with Time Machine and other backup tools.

But the sync does allow you to set it up with an iPhone or iPad. But you have the option. If you don't want it, you by no means have to use it. All the data would just be local.

So we talked about some of the automation, some of the integration with that. The huge built-in script library really is a game changer. And they're always adding to it. One nice feature in Devonthink is in the sidebar, there's a section of like news from the company. And a lot of those posts are like, oh, hey, this is a new script that we've put together. You know, download it, add it to your library. That's always expanding, which is awesome. Yeah.

Well, I mean, I just think that with both these apps and I am biased, I'm friends with the developers of both these apps.

You're supporting good people with these. I'm friends with both of them. Hazel's one guy. Devin thinks a team. These are people that aren't looking to try and chisel you. They're looking to deliver an excellent process, and they want to keep in business so they're going to sell, right? But you're just supporting good people who are very dedicated to the craft and giving you a quality product. It's what really...

in my mind to this day, still makes the Mac the superior platform. Honestly, it's not something Apple does. It's the people like the Hazel guy and the Devon Think guys who make the Mac such a great experience. Yeah, we talk about the Mac ecosystem being a special one because of tools like this.

There's really not things like this on other platforms, even iOS and iPadOS. The things Devon think can do on the Mac, it can't do on the iPhone and iPad. Hazel can't work on the iPhone or iPad, but it makes the Mac really special and useful. And these are two tools that you can set up your automation, right? Like I drop these files here and then things happen and they get stored away automatically.

And you don't have to spend a lot of time in them, but they're there working for you. Having your tasks and jobs executed automatically is the way to go. And I think with Devon Think in particular, building a repository over time. So, you know, we've talked a lot about bills and receipts. I think that's a very common example, like

If you had a database or a collection for every year, then you know where that stuff's going to be in the future. And with automation, you know, you mentioned the example of you had a family member with a bunch of documents and like you got to sort through them all.

You can build these things of like, yeah, this doesn't just have to be like current date and future. You can put things in the past into these systems, adjust your rules, right? Adjust the, okay. Instead of looking for 2024 in the email, look for 2023 and put it over here. Like,

Like these things, these tools can be expanded in a way that you can bring in more data over time, build that library, build that repository. And that way, you know where it is, right? The point of this, the point of file automation in my mind is that when I'm asked for something, I don't spend 10 minutes looking for it. I'm not searching through my email to like find a receipt that my CPA needs. Like, no, like I know right where it is because I did the work on the front end to build these systems and,

And so it means when the question is asked, I can get the data. And both of these tools are great ways to do that. All right. Try them both out. If you would like a field guide, I've got them on it. You can get that 20% off code MPU docs. But if you haven't got into the beauty of document automation, and I mean that, you should check it out because this is a thing we do on computers. And if you can add a level of automation to it, it sure makes it easier, doesn't it? Absolutely.

All right, we are the MacPower users. You can find us at relay.fm slash MPU. Thank you to our sponsor today, and that is our friends over at 1Password. For those more Power Users subscribers, stick around. I have a lot to explain about my new iPhone stand. If you want to sign up, you can still do that very briefly. You can get that discount. Just head over to giverelay.com, and we'll see you next time.