by When using your Mac, it’s common to open files you previously worked with. This obvious workflow trait is what led Apple, many years ago, to add an Open Recent submenu to application File menus, as well as a Recent Items submenu (containing sections for applications, documents, and servers) to the Apple Menu.
But these submenus aren’t nearly as useful as they could be. An application’s Open Recent menu contains only the last few documents used in that particular app, while the Apple Menu’s submenu offers an unfiltered list of all documents used across all apps. Similarly, the Applications section of the Apple Menu’s Recent Items menu includes all apps, including some that launch at login that you may never actually interact with.
If you find these recent-item menus useful, but you wish they were smarter, you’re the target audience for the $10 Trickster (Mac App Store link), a nifty menu-bar utility that’s more flexible and capable than OS X’s built-in options.
Trickster monitors your Mac, watching for any file, folder, or app you open or that is modified. Click Trickster’s systemwide menu-bar icon, and you get a window listing, by default, all those recent items; any Finder labels you’ve applied to items are reflected in the color of each item’s name in the list. Double-click any item to open it, or drag it out of the Trickster window to work with it just as if you were dragging the item’s icon in the Finder.
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