TUAW Tip: Put your a wherever you want

When you download a new a lication, its i tallation proce typically tells you to either drag it into yourMac's A licatio folder, or it has a full-blown i taller that takes care of this proce for you. But who says youhave to keep all your a in the A licatio folder? Many a licatio , from Firefox to Quicksilver and even FCP andPhotoshop, can generally be run from nearly any folder on your Mac, allowing you to organize your a licatio any wayyou see fit.

Why would this matter, you ask? Well, if you're anything like me, you've built up a healthycollection of 3rd party a that you use on a regular basis. If you want an easy way to either backup all these a or quickly bring them all over to another Mac, you can simply keep them in a folder in your Home folder. This way, youcan still use them and call them with tools like Quicksilver, OS X can still find them, and you can easily keep trackof just your a that matter most. This also saves a lot of time if you ever decide to do some serious %26quot ringcleaning" and wipe your entire Mac.

Now, one word of caution with this tip: as a general rule, exercisecare when moving around any of the big a , as well as the a that used a full-blown i taller. I had no troublesmoving the entire Photoshop CS2 folder and Final Cut Pro.a to my desktop and ru ing them, but I have no idea if amove like that could affect the functionality of things like plugi or other addo . My personal rule of thumb (whichha 't failed me yet) is that if an a is a simple drag and drop i tall, it doe 't nece arily have to live in themain A licatio folder.

If you've been using a similar trick like this, TUAW readers, feel free todiscu your ideas in the comments.