MacOS – How to sort/recover deleted items on Mac

Update for OSX 10.9 Mavericks:

It appears that you can now sort by Date Added in OSX Mavericks. In Trash right click one of the columns and click to check the Date Added column. The click on the column header until the list of files is sorted by Date Added descending.

For OS X 10.7 Lion:

Go to the AppleScript Editor, paste in the following script and save it in /Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts:

on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving added_items
    repeat with this_item in added_items
        do shell script "find " & quoted form of POSIX path of this_item & " -exec touch {} \\;"
    end repeat
end adding folder items to

Then…

1. Right-click on any folder in Finder, go to Services and click Folder Actions Setup.

2. Cancel the dialog asking which script to attach.

3. Click the checkbox to Enable Folder Actions

4. Click the plus sign to choose the Trash.

   Press ⌘ cmd + ⇧ shift + G and type in ~/.Trash, click Go or press ↩ return, and then click Open.

5. On the right side, click the plus sign to choose the AppleScript that you saved earlier.

Thanks to Graham for the link which pointed me in the right direction.

I'm not much of an AppleScripter, so this is modified from some scripts at Doug's AppleScripts website, but it's GPLed, so derivative works are allowed as long as they're also GPLed.

My idea was to make a script that could take the release date, which can't be used in smart playlists, and store it in the last skipped date, which can be used in smart playlists. If you just want to do this for podcasts (not for songs, for which you might actually use the last skipped field), just select your podcasts before running this script.

Once you do that, you can create a smart playlist selected on the "Last skipped" field to get the recently released podcasts.

So here we go:

 (*
 You can rename this script to whatever you want
 but please keep this information intact. Thanks.

 This program is free software released "as-is"; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License for more details.

 Get a copy of the GNU General Public License by writing to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA  02110-1301, USA.

 or visit http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html

 *)

 tell application "iTunes"
set sel to selection
if sel is not {} then
    set ofi to fixed indexing
    set fixed indexing to true
    repeat with thisTrack in sel
        set reld to release date of thisTrack
        tell thisTrack to set skipped date to reld
    end repeat
    set fixed indexing to ofi
else
    display dialog return & "Select some tracks first..." buttons {"Cancel"} default button 1 with icon 0 giving up after 15
    return
end if -- no sel    
 end tell