Still there’s no way to get a Finder window to list apps using these Application Categories, and you obviously can’t set them for apps which are bundled with macOS, as they and Safari are protected by SIP. Almost instantly this provides fine-grained Spotlight search in the Finder.
There, the user can define any category they like, and set this as an extended attribute (named :kMDItemApplicationCategories) on the application folder itself. In looking for a solution, I discovered that you can set a metadata value known to Finder’s Find as Application Categories (kMDItemApplicationCategories), which turns out to be quite different from Application Category. You can edit that for many apps, but at your own peril: doing so will break the app’s signature, and can stop it from opening. Neither can the user customise the list of categories, nor assign an app to a category, as that has to be baked into its ist file. The reason for this is that the categories are fixed by Apple, based on those in its App Store, and a great many apps including its own Home and News don’t set a category at all.
I realised this week that wasn’t much help at all, with a total of 177 being listed under Other, including some of Apple’s own apps like Home and News. One solution which might have been helpful is the option to group apps in a Finder window by ‘Application Category’, which could at least have given some clues. There are some wonderful names like Anaconda-Navigator, Twine and Ukelele, and purposeful icons, but what do they all do? That’s become one of the biggest reasons for having a 27 inch display.Īlthough I can remember a lot about many of them, there are some which I always seem to forget, or whose name I can never remember.
I’m more than partly to blame for around forty of them, but that’s still an awful lot of apps, of which a mere 62 are in my Dock. The current count is 461 in my main Applications folder, and a few more scattered in Utilities and elsewhere. I confess: over the years I’ve accumulated far too many apps, even after Catalina’s enforced thinning.
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