AppFlow

Ok, so maybe it is a little late for spring cleaning, but that’s not the point. Does it have to be spring to clean your Mac out? I don’t think so.

Cleaning you Mac is the best way to keep it’s performance as close to new as possible. No, I don’t mean with some screen-cleaner and a cloth. I mean digitally cleaning it out. There are many utilities out their to do just this, but I though I would focus on one in particular today. CleanMyMac.

CleanMyMac is a utility with a reputation.  You don’t have to own a Mac for long to here about it, so I thought it’s about time we looked at it here on AppFlow.

CleanMyMac is a simple and easy to use utility for cleaning out those dusty corners of your Mac for you.  It looks through things such as the Caches and removes those that are no longer required, gaining you more disk space and higher performance.

What does it clean?

CleanMyMac will clean only the areas you specify, here’s a complete list of what it can clean:

• Caches - Cache files are intended to make applications content load faster.  But when cache files accumulate for a long time they can slowdown your browsing experience, and waste a considerable amount of disk space.  It is recommended to quit the application before cleaning its cache files.
• Logs – Log files capture the activity of different applications and system services.  Sometimes, log files can grow to hundreds of megabytes, wasting useful disk space.  For a home user there is no need to keep those files and it is absolutely safe to clean old log files.
• Language Files – Most applications are available in more than a dozen languages.  Each of these waste your disk space, and frequently you need only some of them.
• Universal Binaries – Universal binaries were compiled for both Intel or PowerPC architectures.  But on your Mac, you only use one architecture code, and there is code that never gets executed and is wasting your disk space.  CleanMyMac can automatically remove the unnecessary code from FAT binaries and make your applications load faster.  there might be rare cases when applications can check self modifications to prevent piracy, and they show errors.  In this case you can add the application to the Ignore List and share it with other users.
• System Junk – CleanMyMac will help you remove  .DS_Store files, .Spotlight-V100 folders and other items , which is especially useful for removable devices such as  flash-drives and mp3-players, because they can treat these files as incorrectly formatted media files.  Lots of apps include redundant files that are used only for debugging purposes and therefore, can be safely removed.  CleanMyMac will also cleanup files like: classes.nib, info.nib, data.dependency, and designable.nib with no harm to your mac.
• Trashes and Leftovers – Literally all types of software leave a noticeable amount f traces on your system. These are the files left from previously trashed applications, widgets and broken preferences panes.  CleanMyMac will help you remove all of those files.  Moreover, this module of CleanMyMac will locate iPhoto trash files to clean them up.

Thats a lot of information their.  If you have any questions, do comment below and we’ll do our best to answer them.  Just to boggle your mind a little further, CleanMyMac has another three cards up it’s sleeve, except these will help you maintain a clean Mac rather than doing the spring cleaning.

The first is the Manage Extensions panel.  This panel lists all of your widgets you have install.  It makes it easy to completely uninstall them.  SImple tick the box next to it and hit the big blue “uninstall” button.

The Uninstall Applications panel will remove all files to do with that application.  This doesn’t mean it will remove your Pages documents if you uninstall Pages, but it will remove all files that store information such as your preferences for the application.

The final panel is the Quick Ease Files panel.  This panel will delete any files dragged onto it permanently.  This utility basically allows you to delete a file while evading the Trash.

In Practice

In practice I really think CleanMyMac works.  It’s really simple to use.  Click the scan button, wait while it scans your computer, select what you want to clean and hit the Clean button.  Job Done.  On the first run, after having my Mac for just over a year with little to no maintenance it saved me 2.35GB of space.  And the performance?  Noticeably faster.  Particularly during boot-up.

To me CleanMyMac is one of the “must-have” applications for Mac.  It’s so easy to use and works so seamlessly, and at $29.95 for a LifeTime licence or $14.95 for a 6 month licence I really do think that it is a bargain.