Best Productivity Apps – Trickster Review

What to do with a little Trickster

You know how easy it is to get distracted these days while you are working with your computer. One minute you are writing an article and all of a sudden you find that you are replying to something on Twitter or Facebook. Or you could be working on a project and have a number of files being worked on all at the same time, you close one of these applications down and then find later that you need to get back to it quickly. Maybe you download a file through a web browser and you have some automation in place to put that file in a specific place and you need to get to it quickly. There is the Mac OS X Lion built-in Spotlight search, but that takes time and you are keen to get in there and get the job done quickly. This is where best productivity apps like Trickster can help you. The Trickster application monitors your workflow and the files that you work on and makes those files quickly and easily available with a keystroke, or click on the menu bar.

Finding files on your Mac with Trickster

This application is an update on a previous productivity app called Blast. I did try out Blast, but to be honest, it didn’t really make itself useful enough to me for me to continue using it. Trickster does the same sort of thing, but does a much better job of it. A quick click on Ctrl-Z, if you are keyboard type of person, or you can click on the icon in the menu bar. So you don’t need to worry about where you have saved a file of any kind. It is just not necessary to worry if you have closed the wrong window. Your document is just one click away in one of the best productivity software applications, Trickster.

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Less searching and more finding of files

In a lot of ways, this fits in with the way that Apple expects you to work in the post PC world. Let the application decide where the file is kept on your computer, because you can always get back to it. You can get back to your files through the recent files used in the menu of your application. Alternatively you can use Trickster to get you back into your work.

Best Productivity Apps usage

If you have just downloaded a file and you can’t be bothered to search in your downloads folder, you can find it with Trickster, quick as a flash. If you have been busy and working on a lot of files, then you can find files easily within Trickster with some filtering. There is already, a certain amount of filtering by type of document. You can see all of your movie files in one place, there is a place for your docs and a place for your images. If there are certain files that you want to designate as being more important, then you can flag them. You have a flagged files folder in Trickster and I am finding that to be a very useful feature.

I did open one file, a PDF, in the preview application which comes with Mac OS X and it did not turn up in Trickster. The reason that it didn’t appear was because I didn’t actually make any changes to the file. Once I had added some notes and highlights to text, then it became available in Trickster. At first I thought it was a bug within the application, but on reflection, it seems fairly reasonable for it to work that way.

Favourite folders and files in the Trickster sidebar

When you have your favourite folders in the sidebar, which is to the right of the application, you can easily drag and drop files from the list into a folder. This makes it easy to move files on your Mac. Not only can you move files with drag-and-drop within Trickster, you can also drag files to the e-mail application to put that document within an e-mail you wish to send.

I’m finding it a little weird with the application, that when I drag a file to the applications in the dock, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I can drag a picture to Pixelmator dock icon and Pixelmator will open up with that file. I can drag the same image to Art Text 2 in the dock and the application does not open. I get the same behaviour when I try and drag to Keynote also. Yet if the application is open, be the Keynote or Art Text app, I can drag and drop the image into the application directly. I suppose with this Trickster being a version one of the application, not including its transformation from being called Blast, it is to a certain extent still a work in progress. Mind you, you can see that with a lot of software, even applications that have been around for years.

Is trickster worth getting?

I have to say that I do find Trickster an excellent little Mac productivity software application and well worth the price of four euros to buy it. A good productivity tool for your computing tasks. That is at the half price offer that is available to buy the application at the moment. I’m not so sure that I would be quite so keen to buy it at the $10 price tag. It really does a very good job of finding files for me, as often I need to work with recent files. I have it set so that it finds files of the last week, but that can be changed so that it is the last two or three days. You can also set it to keep track of files for longer periods if you want it to. When you use Trickster alongside the application Found and of course the Mac OS X Spotlight, you certainly have a good set of tools for searching for anything on your computer. So when you are looking for best productivity apps for Mac, Apparent Software would be a good place to look.