“The Mac OS X operating system is a truly remarkable thing. As personal operating systems go, it does a terrific job of maintaining and monitoring what goes on with just about every housekeeping aspect needed to keep things running smoothly. OS X is a modern OS that Apple keeps refining, updating and tweaking, making sure that it’s always up to the demands of the current, as well as the newer, hardware and software. Of course, like every other OS out there, it’s not perfect and never will be. There’s always room for improvement and that’s what keeps things interesting. When there’s a need for something not provided by the operating system, it’s an opportunity for third-party developers to make it happen,” Craig Crossman reports for McClatchy-Tribune News Service.
“Take uninstalling a program for example. You would think that uninstalling something would be easy. Just remove the files you installed and throw them in the Trash. But there’s a problem with that simple solution… you really don’t know what the installer did after it’s finished. You don’t know how many files were installed by the installer and you don’t know where all of them were placed. When you install something new, rarely is the application just one single file. An installation can literally place hundreds of software components that may be scattered in just as many different places across your hard drive. So how do you know what and where they all are? Unless the installer leaves you a detailed description, you’re pretty much out of luck. And even if it does, you still can’t be completely sure about its accuracy,” Crossman reports.
“To make matters worse, there’s really nothing that’s readily available within the Apple OS that gives you that information. So after you install something and decide you want to remove it, you can only hope that the developer included an Uninstall feature within the installer. If not, you were pretty much out of luck. Yes you could remove the big, obvious application file but the rest of it was doomed to stay on your hard drive until the end of time. These orphaned files may not cause any problems but they still take up space and could even cause problems down the road. You really need to get them removed and now there’s something out there that can help you delete everything once and for all,” Crossman reports.
“‘Yank’ [US19.95] is from Matterform Media, it’s billed as ‘Your Mac’s Uninstaller’ and that’s pretty much what it does,” Crossman reports.
Full article here.
