There’s a lot of Macintosh applications out there to let you view and manage the contents of a hard disk in a visual type of way. There’s Disk Inventory X (Editblog article) but it’s from the PowerPC days so it requires emulation with Snow Leopard which doesn’t install by default. There’s also the great Baseline (PVC article) which is quite full featured but costs $20.
Enter DaisyDisk. It also scans a disk and presents the disk in a very fun and very visual way. You can look via files and folders, see the size of files and folders via both a visual view and a list view. Best of all you can use QuickLook to preview the files. You can’t delete from within the app but the developers are working on that. Right click to reveal in Finder and then delete from there is the workaround. The app isn’t perfect as there’s not a lot of documentation and it includes something called “Super-User” mode that isn’t documented. I would have thought that it would unlock a lot more features for how you could manipulate files but it doesn’t seem to do anything.
Is it worth the $19.95? It is not, especially with Baseline being available for $20. But right now you can get DaisyDisk for free by checking out the upcoming MacHeist bundle. If you click around the MacHeist page enough and go to coordinates 151.7, 174.4 (I think that’s right) you’ll see the TWEET FOR A TREAT button appear. This is the key to getting a free license for DaisyDisk. If you click it you’ll be asked to sign in to Twitter. If you do you’ll tweet about the upcoming MacHeist bundle.
Now I’m not a fan of how companies are now giving away free stuff and entering users into contests only if they tweet about it on Twitter. It totally spams followers and the more people do it then the more companies will use this type of marketing and the more it will devalue Twitter as a useful user-to-user communications platform. More noise, less signal. In the case of MacHeist and DailyDisk I didn’t sign in and tweet about MacHeist but when I went back to the MacHeist page there was a download link to a free DaisyDisk license. Sign in to MacHeist and you’ll get a license code, without having to spam your Twitter followers about it. This isn’t exactly what they want but it is getting DaisyDisk into the hands of more users so this is a good thing, right? DaisyDisk is off to a good start so with some improvements it might be worth that $19.95.