Product ReviewsUtilities
Watching the public agony of those volunteered to have their browser histories exposed on Channel 4's dotcomedy, it's clear how messily we work on computers. Apart from the residue from Web sites of dubious, if not salacious, content, we hardly ever clear away the rubbish or dust the surfaces. It's like sitting knee-deep in waste paper, with a year's dust sedimented over the desktop. Spring Cleaning provides 13 button-launched cleaners, which will not only reclaim a surprising amount of hard disk space, but may one day spare you from blushing beside a giggling Gail Porter. A new and separate application, iClean, is a convenient compilation of the most popular tools. With it, you can find and fix broken aliases, clean out defunct or incriminating cookies from your Web browser, empty its Web file cache, zero its history file, and finally empty your Trash or Wastebasket. iClean is designed for quick and repeated use, its options being configured using button selectors before you despatch it with mop and bucket. The more conventional Spring Cleaning application is aimed at less frequent, more thorough work. It, too, gives you the chance to purge your Internet cache, cookies, and history files. Other modules include MacUninstaller, which now allows you to select an application to be uninstalled, or it will search out applications for you. In all Spring Cleaning's searches, this version brings improvements in performance, but best of all it shortens potentially long tasks by allowing you to narrow its search criteria. Unfortunately, while many of its progress bars do show the proportion of the task completed, some have gone the woeful way of Windows and just show an uninformative rotating barber's pole. Another improvement for this release is that the results
Bespoke application uninstallers are still unusual on the Mac. As software has become more dependent on components installed outside its own folder, so it has escalated the problem of knowing which extensions (especially shared libraries) are required for what. The MacUninstaller module doesn't attempt to be too clever - it only removes those components most obviously associated with an application. Perhaps the time has come for Apple or third parties to develop from the Install Log to the Uninstall Log. In the meantime, Spring Cleaning is a methodical way of uninstalling it properly. All its actions are recorded in logs, so if you don't actually throw the bits away for a while, you can still reverse your steps if you happen to have caused problems in another application. If you have never used Spring Cleaning, take a quick look at all that clutter in your Preferences folder: you'll be shocked to see many from applications which you thought had long since gone, files with modification dates older than your computer, and those with generically unhelpful names. Some you'll be happy to flush away now, but many you'll want to exile from your System Folder until you can be sure that they really have outlived their usefulness. This is easily accomplished using different options in the pop-up action menu of the Orphaned Pref Remover module. Next, you may want to be rid of any documents belonging to applications you have deleted. Engage the Document Finder module and you can chuck them out easily. You may also have aliases to these documents, or to the application itself, tucked away, for instance, in the Recent Applications and Recent Documents folders in your Apple menu. The Alias Fixer module is just the job here. Other modules have obvious benefits: Duplicates Remover shows you duplicate copies of documents, applications and other files. Fat App Slimmer strips out the redundant 680x0 code from applications designed to run on both 680x0 and PowerPC models. Font Remover and Help Remover have self-evident functions, with the latter good at identifying superfluous copies of Help engine applications. This new release is a mature product, well worth its modest cost, and essential for every Mac user. By Howard Oakley |
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