The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 9 out of 10]

• Developer: id-design / [Product Page]
  
• Price: Freeware

This week's Pick of the Week is a simple little app that does one thing very well -- help you see what's taking up space on your hard drive. WhatSize opens two windows; one displays a summary view for each of your hard drives; the other, as seen at left, displays a columnar view of a particular location in your file system.

In the shot at left, the view is set to my home folder, with the Pictures directory selected. As you can see, the files are sorted by size and color-coded (megabytes in purple, kilobytes in green), making it easy to see exactly what's taking up the room in any given location. WhatSize also displays all normally "hidden" directories, as indicated by the normally hidden .FBCIndex file in the left pane of the screenshot.

You can, obviously, do all that WhatSize does in either the Finder or via the Terminal (in fact, it was a comment to an earlier hint about using du that tipped me off to WhatSize). However, WhatSize makes it very simple, and it's expandable column-view window lets you easily traverse a folder hierarchy to see exactly what might be taking up unexpected amounts of drive space. If you're not a fan of column view, you can switch to a "browser" view that's somewhat like list view in the Finder. In the browser view, you can easily see the actual size of the files in any given folder (along with the disk space actually used, and those two numbers can differ appreciably for large folders). You can also use the familiar disclosure triangles to drill down the hierarchy.

WhatSize is one of those useful little utilities that you'll try a couple times and then find that it's quickly become a key part of your maintenance routine -- I use it to keep an eye on my Downloads folder, which I sometimes let get a bit out of control! The fact that it's free is simply an added bonus...

[Note to readers: This is actually last week's Pick of the Week. In a fit of stupidity, I wrote the whole thing up and ... left it sitting on my local server all week! Later this (Tuesday) morning, I'll post this week's Pick of the Week, and I'm going to try to fit both of them in the header since this one got the short end of the "time on site" stick.]