Sunday, September 24, 2006

Too cheap to pay for AppZapper?

AppZapper is a really easy to use Uninstall program.

As you know, uninstalling a program on the Mac is easy enough - just drag the application icon into the trash. But often you are left with preference files, caches, etc. AppZapper will find those for you too, and with a click of a button, move them all to the trash at once.

The shareware price is a deal at $12, but the software isn't perfect, and maybe you don't want to pay for something you could do yourself. You are allowed 5 free "zaps" as part of the demo. But an easy way to use AppZapper forever without paying is to let it find the files that need deleting, but instead of pressing "Zap!", just go delete them yourself. Then press "Cancel" until next time.

Spotlight meta tags

I rarely use Spotlight any more, since QuickSilver does such a fabulous job of finding files on my computer. But unlike Quicksilver, Spotlight searches an underused file property (or should I say Info) that users may access by highlighting a file and pressing the CMD-I. Notice the first field is called Spotlight Comments? It never even occured to me what that field is for, but you can add metadata (tags) to any file so that it becomes searchable via Spotlight.

One possible use for this... Let's say that you like to test out a lot of freeware Mac applications, but you end up having so many small programs in your Applications folder that you forget what they even do. By entering a description into the Spotlight Comments field, you not only get a description, but searchable data. So months after installing Audacity, you think "hmm, don't I have a freeware audio editor somewhere? Now where did I put it?"

So now you can launch a program without even knowing its name :)