Want to Automatically Maintain Your Mac?  Check Out Macaroni!

November 9th, 2008 at 2:00 PM - Columns and Opinions by John F. Braun

Product Link : Macaroni 2.1.1 ($9.99 Trialware)
Company Link : Atomic Bird

Thanks to the UNIX roots of Mac OS X, the operating system will try to keep things running smoothly by running regularly scheduled maintenance tasks, such as clearing out old log files, rebuilding system databases, and other tasks. Unfortunately, if your Mac isnit on when these tasks are scheduled, they may not get run for a long time, leading to the buildup of all sorts of cruft. The good news is that using Macaroni will make sure these tasks are run, and more.

Macaroni Preference Pane

One of the first things youill see is if and when your daily, weekly and monthly maintenance has been run. If youive ever wondered exactly what happens during these maintenance events, simply click on the event, and youill get a rundown of all the tasks performed by the script. If youid like to force a script to execute, just click on it, and click "Run Job Now," and the script will run.

But Macaroni does a few more interesting things, too. One is that you can schedule a running of Repair Permissions. Bad permissions are often the cause of odd system behavior, so running this from time to time isnit a bad idea. You can also Remove Localized Files, which trims resources for languages that you donit need. Finally, for those who want to perform their own scheduled tasks, Macaroni allows you to define a New Job, where you can choose a program and run it on a regular schedule. Of course you can do this via the command line, but Macaroni provides a nice GUI to limit the pain.

So make sure your Mac is properly maintained, and get Macaroni now! Have any other gadgets that help take care of your Mac? Send an [removed]eval(unescape(i[removed]('email to John')i))[removed] and heill give it a spin.

John is a software engineer who works in the corporate R&D group of a Fortune 500 company, focusing on imaging and printing technologies. He has AS, BS and MS degrees in various computing disciplines, so his friends and colleagues are somewhat surprised that he’s a Mac enthusiast.  After spending the day developing in an environment comprised largely of PCs, and watching colleagues wrestle with the horror that is Windows, he’s glad to come home to a MacBook Pro and PowerMac G5 at the end of the day.