Universal Mac OS X maintenance utilities

Here's a quick survey of the currently available Universal (Intel-native and compatible) maintenance utilities for Mac OS X.

Cocktail

• Priced at US $14.95
• Same great interface with which users have become familiar
• Extremely fast performance of tasks
• Most routines seem to work well
• The full functionality of a relatively mature Mac OS X maintenance application. Performs virtually any troubleshooting related maintenance procedure.
• Some minor features do not function properly -- enabling the Exposé blob for instance.

USE

• Priced at US $5
• Installs as a menu item
• Generates frequent AppleScript errors
• Confusing interface
• Useless status indicators

YASU

• Free
• Offers a very clean, simple interface
• Not as feature-rich as some other tools, but performs general maintenance tasks well
• Forces restart when performing some deep caches -- a good idea that isn't implemented by some other tools.

ONyX

• Free
• One of the most feature-complete maintenance utilities
• Extremely fast on Intel hardware
• Has a bevy of troubleshooting procedures built-on; for instance, resetting of the Mac Help cache files.
• Let's you view Unix man pages
• Can check for corrupt preferences -- a great feature
• Requires entry of password at launch, before performing any tasks -- not necessarily a good practice from a security standpoint, but very convenient for executing subsequent tasks.
• Some minor kinks in the use of the UNIX "locate" command on Intel-based Macs
• Also fails to generate Exposé blob

Resources