Problems with the kinkless rules

Hi there, I'm one of probably many who discovered Hazel through the Kinkless site. Very impressed with what I saw, but I have to say my own experiences with Hazel have been a bit frustrating.

I installed the updated rules from Kinkless and gave them a spin, and here's what happened:
I drop a file into my inbox, and it rarely gets a green colour. Some downloads do, but not all. I'm using firefox and I saw elsewhere that this is a known issue.
File I copy to my inbox from elsewhere on my disk never seem to get a green colour. My impression was that 'added' means 'copied into this folder', so any file should become green until I open it. Is that a wrong assumption? (Date Added is in the last 1 Day and Date Last Opened is before Date Added)

Most seriously, I dropped a folder from a network drive into my inbox, and immediately hazel kicked in and deleted all the files. Not really what I was expecting. (Last Opened is after Date Added and Date Added is not in the last 1 Day)

My question is, is this normal behaviour based on the kinkless rules? It's different from what I expected, but perhaps my expectations were wrong.

Here's mdls data for a file I copied into my inbox, and expected to turn green. Out of curiosity, which of these is 'date added' and which is 'last opened'?

Code: Select all: kMDItemAttributeChangeDate = 2007-08-27 17:12:53 +0200 kMDItemContentCreationDate = 2007-08-24 10:43:39 +0200 kMDItemContentModificationDate = 2007-08-24 10:43:39 +0200 kMDItemContentType = "dyn.ah62d4rv4ge80g65x" kMDItemContentTypeTree = ("public.data", "public.item") kMDItemDisplayName = "extracted-blog" kMDItemFSContentChangeDate = 2007-08-24 10:43:39 +0200 kMDItemFSCreationDate = 2007-08-24 10:43:39 +0200 kMDItemFSCreatorCode = 0 kMDItemFSFinderFlags = 16 kMDItemFSInvisible = 0 kMDItemFSIsExtensionHidden = 1 kMDItemFSLabel = 0 kMDItemFSName = "extracted-blog.css" kMDItemFSNodeCount = 0 kMDItemFSOwnerGroupID = 501 kMDItemFSOwnerUserID = 501 kMDItemFSSize = 2056 kMDItemFSTypeCode = 0 kMDItemID = 694376 kMDItemKind = "Style Sheet" kMDItemLastUsedDate = 2007-08-27 17:12:53 +0200 kMDItemUsedDates = (2007-08-27 17:12:53 +0200)

Thanks alot.

Yes, so date added is the date/time when a file is moved/copied into a folder that Hazel monitors. It's not recorded by OS X which is why your 'mdls' dump doesn't show it.

If you really want to see the Date Added, you can muck about in your Library/Application Support/Hazel folder. In there should be a .hazeldb file for reach folder Hazel is monitoring. Unfortunately, I don't have a easy concise way of correlating them but just do a search through them to look for the file. If you need help with this, email me and I can give you the more involved instructions.

Also, there is a bug now concerning date added when you drop a folder in and you have the rules set up to descend into the folders. Basically, when Hazel first encounters a file, it won't have a date added so it will use the modification date of its parent folder as its best guess. This works fine at the top level but doesn't take into account what happens when you drop a folder with its own files. In such a case, the files inside the folder get a "Date Added" based on their parent's mod date which can be before it was added to the top level, if that makes sense. If you aren't following, then just rest assured that I'm working on a fix for the next point release.

So, check the date added and also the date opened (use "Get Info" in Finder, not the access time from the command line) and see if they are consistent with the behavior you are seeing. If not, then something is wrong.

Thanks a lot for your reply. Just now I tried copying a file into my inbox and, lo and behold, it turned green

Perhaps my computer was in a funky state, I'll try to reproduce this behaviour again, hopefully without success...