Weekly Utilities Update: OnyX, Porticus, MacClean, 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.
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.
Not many utilities were updated in the past week, which more than likely is because of the holidays. Happy New Year!
For people who run the maintenance utilities "OnyX" and "Maintenance", the developers have provided a few of updates in recent weeks, as they are iron out issues with Snow Leopard and other small glitches. I recommend if you use these applications to regularly check for updates, which can be found using the update option in the application menu but which we will also post here.
The utility MacClean has been updated, which like OnyX and Maintenance offers options to remove old cache and log files, but offers little in terms of rebuilding and fixing problems with various services. Despite this, it may be useful for some people, though I prefer the tried and true OnyX.
On the Unix/BSD side of OS X, a couple of useful utilities have been updated. I recently wrote a how-to on installing open source software using "Fink", but MacPorts is another popular option as well. For each of these solutions there are a couple of handy GUI interfaces, and "Porticus" for MacPorts having been updated to version 1.8.1 recently. This update tackles a number of small bugs, and improves support for the latest version of MacPorts.
If you are a terminal user, you might take a look at CLIX, which is a terminal command organization and cataloging utility. While I personally do not see much value in it (since I prefer to use shell scripts for saving complex commands and then adding them to the shell paths), the program is free and might be useful. Regardless of the utility of the program, the included commands the developers have already catalogued are a handy reference, especially for new terminal users.
Recently Updated Utilities:
- CLIX 2.0.0.7 - Mac OS X command line interface in a Cocoa app.
- Xfile Test Drive 2.1.0.3 - ACP file management utilities including Xfile.
- Porticus 1.8.1 - GUI for the MacPorts open source packaging system.
- MacClean 2.0 - Clean your cache, and verify permissions and images.
- Maintenance 1.3.2 - System maintenance & cleaning utility.
- OnyX 2.1.3 - Maintenance, optimization and system personalization tool.
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