Paul Kim

Paul Kim is a New York City-based Mac developer best known as the creator of Hazel, the automation utility that watches folders and files, renames, sorts and cleans them according to rules. He runs Noodlesoft, which describes itself as a one-man company making Mac software since 2006, and in which he jokingly holds every role from Chief Noodler to customer support.

Kim began his career writing software for NeXT computers, the platform that later became the foundation of Mac OS X, and went on to work at Lighthouse Design, one of the best-known NeXT software developers of the 1990s. After some years in the Java world he returned to Cocoa development and founded Noodlesoft.

Hazel was first released in September 2006. It started as a tool for keeping folders tidy and grew into one of the most recommended Mac power-user apps: rules can match files by name, date, type, source website and contents, then move, rename, tag, archive, upload or run scripts, while App Sweep cleans up support files left behind by deleted apps. It integrates with Spotlight, Photos, Music, Shortcuts, AppleScript and Automator. Hazel 5 arrived in December 2020, and Kim wrote a candid postmortem about the server overloads, trial bugs and thousands of support emails that followed. Hazel 6 shipped in October 2024 with text recognition, custom list attributes and macOS Sequoia support, and Hazel 6.1 added the Liquid Glass look for macOS Tahoe.

Kim has deliberately avoided subscriptions and the Mac App Store, selling Hazel as a one-time licence with paid major upgrades because, as he has put it, there was no reason to change something that works. Hazel turned 20 in September 2026.

He is one of the quiet legends of the Mac indie scene: a NeXT-era engineer who has sustained a single utility for two decades entirely on his own.