posted on Mac Beginners

Admitedly a few of these apps may be for the more advanced user, but they are pretty straightforward and easy to learn if it’s the type of thing you think you need. Much like your old windows box maintenance is the key - although not as often and not as intense, i have already mentioned AppDelete - an application that will delete the application you choose and any associated items (files and folders) that belong to that application - and Main Menu - an application that sits in your menubar and makes running maintenance scripts a one click easy job but i think it is worth mentioning a few other things to help with the mac-housework.

First off, something that comes in usefull every now and again to clean out my browser caches, history, searches etc is a little application called AfterSurf - basically quit your browsers, tick a few boxes and hit “clean” and job done - relieve that sluggish browser affect and check out AfterSurf.

Now this one may seem a little advanced but it is worth mentioning as a lot of people seem to use this - it’s called AppleJack and its troubleshooting assistant and maintenance application that runs from the command line, if you like, in a menu base system. I don’t personally use this but people do tend to find this a handy tool so it’s worth checking out to see if it’s for you.

A little tip to win back some space from osx on your brand spanking new machine is to remove the extra language support files that osx installs - like for instance, i’m british and personally only need the british and american english language files all the rest like africaans, basque, etc are just laking up space. To help you do this there is an application called Monolingual just tick the boxes to the languages you DON’T require and hit “remove” and job done - takes a while for the files to be extracted and deleted, and remember to be carefull to ONLY remove the languages that are not required or it’s to the install disks for you and i don’t want to be the cause of that.

Punakea File management - “Punakea is a little app trying to help you cope with the day-to-day struggle of managing your files. Designed to complement Spotlight, it allows you to tag your files and bookmarks, freeing you of the strict hierarchy of the Finder’s folder structure.”

Set your default applications to open certain file types and file extensions with RCDefaultApp and you’ll never end up opening up your heavy duty image applications when all you want to do is view a jpeg in preview.

In the menu under the open application name there is a submenu called “Services” and with ServiceScrubber you can trim it down to only the services you use like the screen grab service - for instance i also use thesaurus, translation service, omni dictionary and they go into the service menu for use within applications - check it out if you haven’t discovered the service menu yet and make it work to your needs.