If you’re like me and you decide not to use the ‘Design Notes’ or the synchronisation features of Dreamweaver at all (or at least not very often) and/or you use other FTP clients to transfer files and/or pass site files over to other designers to work on then you have probably been bugged to have to manually remove all of the ‘_notes’ folders that Dreamweaver makes inside every folder of your site.
I’d gotten tired of doing this manually so I thought I’d make a quick and dirty solution to it, after a little it of work using Mac OSX’s Automator application I created a script which looks for all instance of folders named ‘_notes’ and then puts them in the trash. So all I have to do now is run this application every so often and then they all get dumped in the trash leaving my folders clear and ready to pass on to someone else or upload using another FTP client.
Presenting ‘Delete _notes’
The application was pretty simple to make using Automator and was saved as a proper ‘.app’ package application. I then went and made little icon for the file instead of the generic icon, again this is fairly quick and dirty (admittedly it looks like it’s for deleting Dreamweaver itself!!!) but it looks ok.
I then packaged the app into an installer using the PackageMaker application that is part of Apple’s developer tools to make it easy to install. Although the application can run from anywhere on your machine the installer will put it in the ‘Applications’ folder, but you can change this to any location you want.
Download ‘Delete _notes’
I’ve made the app available here to download in case it’s of any use to anyone, it wasn’t terribly complicated to build but maybe it could be useful? Please remember that you use this at your own risk, no warranty or guarantee is given or implied. You should always make sure you have backed up all files before running potentially risky software that intends to delete files like this one! That said it runs fine on my machine running Leopard and does what it was intended to do.
If that hasn’t put you off then go ahead and download it! I’ve zipped it up so it’s only about 120Kb in size
Addendum: It is possible to stop ‘_notes’ folders being made in the first place
Just in case you weren’t aware that you can stop the ‘_notes’ folders being made in the first place then I should link to an Adobe Technote explaining it. I’ve been confused by this in the past so it’s probably worth linking to here so that if you don’t want the _notes files created at all then you can do so, rather than running the ‘Delete _notes’ application all the time!
~Rick