Product Reviews

When Apple decided to base Mac OS X on Unix, it brought many advantages to the operating system, but there were drawbacks. As a system originally designed for running servers, Unix carries out housekeeping tasks in the middle of the night; unless your computer is on, it can quickly clog up.

Cocktail provides one of the most elegant solutions to this problem. Its Pilot mode gives even the least technical user a one-click optimisation tool. The basic options - clean caches, run cron scripts, delete rotated log files and repair permissions - are presented clearly on the main interface window, and there's an exhaustive list of fine-tuning options behind the Options button (luckily, though, throughout Cocktail, a Defaults button can reset everything).

Even better, these tasks can be scheduled, so they run at a more convenient time. In either case, after they have run, Cocktail can quit, log out, sleep, restart or shut down your Mac. The Tiger edition

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- released quickly after its launch - even has Automator actions so you can integrate such housekeeping tasks into wider workflows.

On its own, this polished implementation would earn Cocktail a high mark, but there's so much more to the application.

It offers an excellent, broadly safe way to tinker with your system. It requires admin rights even to run, so there's no danger of an inexperienced user screwing things up, and the help files are a model of clarity and detail.

In addition to Pilot, the main window contains icons for the five other main sections: Disk, System, Files, Network and Interface. Each of these drops down to further options - potentially bewildering, but elegantly and sensibly presented - giving access to plenty of configuration tools. Want an easy way to show the useful debug menu in Safari? Click a checkbox. Want to import Internet Explorer favourites? Click a button. Force-empty the Trash? Enable kiosk mode at login? Show invisible files? Check, check, check. Separate windows even offer a browser for Unix manual pages, detailed system specifications pages and much more besides.

There are some minor omissions,such as a lack of support for UPS power management, and, of course, there's nothing here that can't be done free with a few well-chosen Unix commands. But for the rest of us, looking for a way to keep our Mac ticking over, there's no better utility. It's less than a tenner for a single-user licence, and system admins should love the worldwide site licence, which costs less than £400. A gem.