14 DAY TRIAL // I have a gripe with the OS X Trash? the Classic one was better. What is there to possibly complain about, the Trash is just the Trash? But that's where you are wrong. OS X brought many new things to the table, many of them good, but if there is one thing that was lost in the transition it's the Trash. Before OS X, you could select any item in the Trash and send it back to its original location. This simple functionality can be a life saver, and those familiar with the old Trash have felt its absence. Smart Trash promised to be an application that made the Trash smarter, and although the description made no mention of the 'restore' option, I has secret hopes it might be in there.
Where is the documentation? In what I consider to be a normal and healthy computer habit, I read the documentation to any new program before actually starting to poke around in it. Seeing as how this is a program that works with the trash, whose sole purpose is to destroy your files, I was very unpleasantly surprised when the documentation proved to be very lacking in actual information.
The "Read Me" contains two lines about the actual functionality of the program, and several pages on how to register and get your money into the developer's pocket. Perhaps focusing a bit more on the application might be a better way to make the user happy and increase your chances of actually getting paid.
The web site contains even less information about the functionality of this program, and there is no in-program help. In short, you are left to discover the wonderful possible uses of this program on your own. It's not complex in any way and veteran computer users should not really need any documentation, however, for those who are still green, the documentation could prove very important.
What it does Smart Trash does a grand total of 4 things, all of which are accessible via the new menu item it creates.
The first is an 'Empty Trash' command that seems to be every bit the same as the normal Finder one, except you can invoke it using a different keyboard shortcut.
The second is the 'Empty Trash of?' command, which will open a sub menu from which you can choose any of the currently mounted volumes. This will allow you to empty the trash of only the items that come from a certain volume, leaving all other items untouched. If a volume has no items in the trash, it will be grayed out and unselectable.
The third is the 'Smart Delete' option. This opens up a new window, in which you can manually select the items you want to delete. Everything is grouped under its corresponding volume, and the size of the items is also shown. At the top of the window, a status display indicates how many items you currently have selected out of all the possible items, and how much space they occupy, out of the space taken by all items in the trash.
The fourth and last thing Smart Trash does is create logs, should you wish them, in which it keeps track of everything it does.
Any Good? As someone with the habit of emptying the trash once a week or so, I see a lot of potential uses for this application. However, most of the things that would really be helpful are not possible.
I will skip the 'Empty Trash' function because it is no different to that of the Finder, and the 'Empty Trash of?' command does the same thing as opening up 'Smart Delete' and selecting the contents of one volume. So the entire application boils down to the Smart Delete window.
The problem with it is that it is not as flexible as it could be. There is a size column, and the size of each item is shown, so why on earth does it not let you sort the items by size, so you can get rid of those large files first? While we are on the subject, a date column might also not go bad, so you can easily see the items that were placed in the trash over a week ago, how about the option to automatically delete anything in the trash that is older than a set amount of days?
So many ways this program could have actually been great, but in its current state, it is barely useful.
The Good Lets you selectively choose what to delete from the trash and makes it very easy to delete the items of one volume only.
The Bad No actual documentation, and quite limited in what it can do.
The Truth It does offer some improvements over the standard Trash, but they are nothing spectacular.
Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:
