One thing that takes many people who have switched from Windows some getting used to is the relative ease of installing and uninstalling software on the Mac. We’ll assume for the moment that you know how to install a program, but you may have been told that uninstalling a program is easy - all you have to do is drag it to the trash. Well, that is all you have to do to vanquish the original application bundle, but the problem is that if you have run the application even once, it’s probably created other files on your hard drive that will be left behind. In particular, there’s almost certainly some sort of preferences file stored on the drive, usually somewhere in one of the Library folders or subfolders.
While you could search for these and delete them manually (and Spotlight makes that easy enough to do IF you have some idea what the name of such files might be), there is software available to automate the process of making programs clean up after themselves. As is often the case in the Mac world, there are a couple of programs where it appears that the designers put a lot of effort in to making “eye candy”, and naturally those program are not free. They are also a bit cumbersome to use - you have to open the program and wait for it to load, and then drag the app you want to uninstall onto their window. Not quite as easy as just dragging the unwanted app to the trash.
AppTrap takes a different approach. There is no graphic interface until you actually attempt to delete a application by dragging it to the trash. AppTrap runs in the background and when it sees that you’ve trashed an app, it pops up a window and asks if you want to trash the files associated with the software.
AppTrap is FREE and in our experience seems to work just as well as the programs that cost money, though we will grant that it doesn’t have fancy icons or a nice windowed interface to drag apps into. It just waits for you to trash an app in the normal manner, then does its work. There is a tremendous advantage to this approach - you never forget to use it, because it’s always there.
For those that that really, really want some sort of full-featured application with a GUI, but still don’t want to pay for this type of software, mosey on over to the AppCleaner page, and note that there are separate downloads for Leopard and Tiger. From the AppCleaner web site:
Simply drop an application onto the AppCleaner icon and AppCleaner searches for the related files and you can delete them by clicking the delete button.
If you change your mind, just click on the cancel button.
The “Applications” button shows all the applications installed on your system. You can select them and then click on the search button. AppCleaner will search for the related files of the selected applications and delete them, too.
The “Widgets” button shows all the installed widgets and the “Others” button displays all the installed Preference Panes, Plugins and Screen Savers.
We haven’t tried AppCleaner because we are happy with AppTrap, but everyone has different preferences in software, so we mention AppCleaner as another option for those who, for one reason or another, don’t care for AppTrap.
Now, having said that, we will caution you that in our experience, none of these types of applications are able to delete 100% of the files that certain programs lay down on your hard drive. This is particularly true in the case of some “trialware” apps that are free to use for a certain number of days, then either stop working entirely or disable some part of their feature set, in an attempt to coerce you into paying for the software. Such programs use all manner of techniques to make sure that neither you, nor programs like AppTrap can find all of the files they’ve left behind. So, if you install this kind of program with the expectation that it will reset the clock on your expired “trialware” programs, you’ll most likely be disappointed. But if you just want to clean up the preference files and other “normal” associated files (ones that the software author doesn’t make an extraordinary effort to hide), a program such as AppTrap or AppCleaner will usually do the trick.
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