[BlueApple]

http://www.maintain.se/

It's a shareware utility that maintains MacOS X. Anyone used it?

[chucker]

http://forums.applenova.com/showthre...light=cocktail
http://forums.applenova.com/showthre...light=cocktail
http://forums.applenova.com/showthre...light=cocktail
http://forums.applenova.com/showthre...light=cocktail
http://forums.applenova.com/showthre...light=cocktail
http://forums.applenova.com/showthre...light=cocktail
http://forums.applenova.com/showthre...light=cocktail
http://forums.applenova.com/showthre...light=cocktail
http://forums.applenova.com/showthre...light=cocktail
http://forums.applenova.com/showthre...light=cocktail
http://forums.applenova.com/showthre...light=cocktail
http://forums.applenova.com/showthre...light=cocktail
http://forums.applenova.com/showthre...light=cocktail
http://forums.applenova.com/showthre...light=cocktail
http://forums.applenova.com/showthre...light=cocktail
http://forums.applenova.com/showthre...light=cocktail
http://forums.applenova.com/showthre...light=cocktail
http://forums.applenova.com/showthre...light=cocktail
http://forums.applenova.com/showthre...light=cocktail

Evidently, yes, various people used it.

Personally, I've used it myself in the past (among similar utilities such as OnyX), but I prefer the inconvenience of having to work my way around manually over the risk of having bugs in such a software cause more harm than good.

Recent example, although on Windows: a "registry cleaner" my father used that was apparently either written not to support NT permissions at all, or simply wasn't written well, ended up completely disallowing access to the entire HKLM (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE) hive, rendering virtually any software installations impossible (took a while to figure out why, and how such nonsense could happen to begin with), and being somewhat difficult to fix (reinstall is almost never an option for me, unless completely inevitable). In short, a program with an allegedly positive outcome (a cleaner registry, causing less disk space used and a faster overall system performance) actually caused a hugely negative one (the complete inability to install almost any software, not to mention limitations in using already-installed programs). From such experiences, I stay away from such — excuse me — 'junk'.

Of course, it's near-impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff. Some such utilities are great, have few bugs, virtually never cause problems and help a lot of people, especially those new to the platform (or with little to no interest to dive deeper). On the other hand, many have well-known problems and are used by naïve users regardless, which makes for increased support costs to OS vendors such as Apple and Microsoft, since the users are clueless that the problems are, in fact, not caused by the OS, but by the allegedly useful utility.