Tumblefile 1.0

Introducing a tiny app with highest usefulness to code size ratio that I wrote so far.

Tumblefile is an automatic, chronological file organizer for GNOME Linux.

Every five minutes it copies all files on your Desktop to a folder such as ~/Documents/2009-07-July/25-Saturday, prepending a timestamp (like 20090727.1645) to the filename. Meanwhile its little window sits in the system tray. It is a way to automatically keep your Desktop cleared and files organized.

The idea is of Luke Crawford. He wrote it as a Ruby script for OS X. I wrote Tumblefile in C++ with a GTK+ user interface.

I dig it because it changed the way I perceive the Desktop surface. Now it acts as a dropbox for random images, documents and links that I find on the web. I don’t have to spend any time thinking whether to keep them, and where. Previously I wouldn’t keep them at all in fact – I just didn’t think that way. But now I have a part of my hard drive that’s kind of like a journal.

And I don’t want to do zero-point-something releases of Linux apps any more.

The code is on github.