Noodlesoft Forums

Is it possible to use Hazel to identify applications that are rarely launched? Unlike other files, applications don’t appear to have a date attribute that can be used for this purpose.

You can try the "last opened" date though it may not be reliable. I suggest checking the dates of all your apps in Finder to see if they are accurate at all.

I tried that option but it generally doesn't change from a fixed date. Thanks anyway.

Excuse me if I chime in, as I would also like to identify unused programs.

From what I can see on my Mac, such files have identical values in the "Date added" and "Date last opened" attributes. So a Hazel rule like

"Date last opened" is "Date added"

should find them, right?

However, this does not work; no files are found, although I can see in Hazel's rules preview that the file attributes mentioned above are identical.

Am I overlooking/misunderstanding something here?

While for some applications the last opened date changes with use, it appears that for others it doesn't. I assume it reflects changes to the internal contents of the app folder.

WorkflowsGuy: The dates may be off by seconds/milliseconds so they may not be an exact match.

SteveH: Not sure if it correlates with the app contents changing as they are not supposed to change, especially with apps commonly being codesigned nowadays. Changing the contents will make it so that it doesn't match up with its signature. Note also that apps which mess with app contents (like stripping out languages) can potentially screw up apps now because of this.