14 DAY TRIAL // I never realized it before, but one of the reasons that I pretty much started using column view exclusively when OS X came out is the way it handles icon placement. Years of Classic left me very familiar with icons and the shiny new big ones in OS X were amazing at the time, however once the novelty wore off, I slowly migrated to the columns view. Columns simply offered me more per square pixels than the icon view, but it was not until recently that I realized exactly why I had this sensation. OS X is optimized to work with big 128 pixel square icons and the icon grid, as such, is also optimized for that size. Once the novelty of the big icons wears off and you resize them to something more appropriate for work, you notice that the system leaves a huge amount of space between the icons on the same row. The vertical space between icons is properly handled, but the horizontal one is always the same, regardless of whether the icons are 128x or 16x. This inevitably leads to a lot of wasted space, unless you use some third party program such as Tidy.
What it does Tidy is a little program that rearranges your icons in OS X, using the settings you desire, thus avoiding the waste of space that normally occurs. You can tidy up any colder whatsoever and you can specify the horizontal and vertical distance between icons, as well as what criteria you want to use to sort them.
Working with it Everything in Tidy takes place within its only window, which is split up into two parts. On the top you have the icon sort settings, while on the bottom you have the folder list.
From the upper part of the window you can change the spacing between the icons, both horizontally and vertically. These sliders can be tweaked for each and every folder, as they do not represent universal variables. The third slider will determine the shape of the resulting window. Unlike the Finder that will arrange the icons depending on how big the window is horizontally so that you only have to scroll up or down, Tidy works irrespective of the window size. Although this slider is labeled 'Files Per Column' what it does is actually determine the number of files per Row, quite a nasty case of mislabeling. On the right you can choose how you want the grid to look like, whether it is ordered or staggered horizontally or vertically. Also here you can choose how you want the program to sort the items, including a 'no sort' option and a very, very handy 'folders always on top' one. Being able to always have the folders on top is a huge timesaver if you are used to this system and there should really be a default Finder option.
On the bottom part of the window you have the folder list. Tidy is quite intelligent in how it handles what to order. If this half of the window is collapsed, the program will simply tidy up the front most Finder window. However, if the folder list is expanded, it will ignore the Finder entirely and tidy up the folders present in the list. This happens even if the list is empty and the list will only take the specified folder, ignoring any subfolders that might be present inside. These limitations can be a bit annoying as you can't simply tidy up an entire drive in one go.
Issues After getting my bearings and figuring out how the application works, I started out tidying up various folders.
The first thing I noticed is that the very first item in any window will have a vertical offset, being placed slightly below where it should normally be. This happened across all folders and irrespective of what that first item was. After some further experimenting, I discovered that it only actually happens if the icon sizes are above 40x, which makes no sense whatsoever.
The other thing I noticed, that is even more of a problem is how the program handles application packages, namely not at all. Packages are simply ignored by the application. They will be left exactly where they are, except for moving slowly down every time that you try to tidy the folder. Apparently this issue is well known to the developer and it seems there is no fix for it. Application packages simply won't move, leaving any folder that contains them in a state of mess, depending on how many such packages are there.
The Good A more compact ordering of the icons, complete with the option to place folders on top.
The Bad Always misplaces the very first item in a folder if the icons are above a certain size and is utterly incapable of ordering application packages that it simply cannot touch.
The Truth This program would be perfect for those who love their icons and like a little more control over them, if it only worked right. The first item offset is something that can be lived with, but the fact that it won't touch application packages is a big issue. It is still quite serviceable, just not on each and every folder out there.
Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:
