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Weekly Utilities Update: Pacifist, GrandPerspective, NTFS-3G, more...

Our Weekly Utilities Update report is a list of all the updates for many Mac utilities that have been released in the past week, and takes a closer look at a couple of them.

Topher Kessler MacFixIt Editor
Topher, an avid Mac user for the past 15 years, has been a contributing author to MacFixIt since the spring of 2008. One of his passions is troubleshooting Mac problems and making the best use of Macs and Apple hardware at home and in the workplace.
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Topher Kessler
3 min read

Our Weekly Utilities Update report is a list of all the updates for many Mac utilities that have been released in the past week. While utilities can be any tool that helps you perform a routine task (including image manipulation and synchronization), our main focus in this column is to bring you those that help in troubleshooting Mac hardware and software problems.

Small Review: Contents

I periodically browse through my user library an have been amazed at times with how much clutter can accumulate in there. While the library should function just fine regardless of the clutter, it sometimes helps to have a clean and organized library, and remove any unused resources that are in there.

The application "Contents" is a new utility that aims to simplify the organization of and interaction with items in your user library, giving the ability to browse and search, as well as perform some small maintenance tasks to the library all in the same interface. While it consolidates features like browsing and searching the library, these features can be performed in the Finder. The key benefit that Contents brings is the preference folder cleanup routine, which searches for preference files that have not been used.

The "Contents" window is clean and pretty. Fuel Collective

Overall, Contents does not provide any significantly new functionality; rather, it provides convenient access to what you can already do via the Finder. Nevertheless, for people who regularly clear out the preferences folder and otherwise manage the Library, Contents may help. While you can download it and try it for free, a license will cost you $10.

Other Recently Updated Utilities

For other maintenance utilities, Cocktail and MainMenu have been updated. MainMenu is just a bugfix update, but Cocktail has added support for clearing Flash player and Chrome browser files, while addressing some performance and compatibility issues with OS X Server.

In addition to maintenance-specific programs, the antivirus package "Sophos" has received an update to its engine and malware/virus definitions database. Additionally, a small update to Grand Perspective is available. The Sophos engine update clears a problem with slowdowns when scanning retrospect backup archives, and the attempted scanning of unsupported Stuffit archives. Grand Perspective (one of my favorite utilities for visualizing disk and folder contents usage) provides new features for scanning filters and masks, allowing you to more easily target certain types of files in the grand perspective window. It also addresses a couple of bugs in the code.

Here is this week's list of updated utilities:


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