Hazel 3.0? Yes please.

One of my all-time favorite Mac utilities, Hazel just turned 3.0. I’ve been using the beta for several months and today I’m paying my $10 upgrade fee gladly. ($25 for a new license is also a steal.)

Paul, not surprisingly, did an amazing job with this update with useful new actions like import into Aperture and syncing. Yes, you can one-way sync a file or folder to another location with a Hazel action. (Think about that for a few moments.) The Rule preview feature gives a popover to display a file’s attributes with highlighted attributes for the matching rule. Perhaps my favorite improvement is nested rules letting you combine “and”, “or”, and “not” to automate in new and smarter ways.

The user interface also looks sharper and is more useful. Conditions and actions are now draggable/reorderable. Finally, he built everything around a new engine that makes it all even more efficient.

Here is a page showing off some of the changes. Also, if you are new to Hazel, go listen to the now dated MPU show about it. Perhaps we’ll need to do a new show.