Filed under: Software, Cool tools, Friday Favorite
Friday Favorite: MainMenu 2 keeps your Mac running smoothly
I'm a sucker for Mac maintenance utilities.That's not to say that I run them on a regular basis like I should do, but whenever I find a new one I like to give it a try and see how it's going to work for me. Dare To Be Creative Ltd. recently released version 2.0 of MainMenu, a collection of Mac utilities that resides in your menu bar.
The US$10 application takes up very little real estate in your menu bar, displaying a small rounded square icon with a plus sign in the center (you can choose other icons as well). Clicking the icon unveils the menu seen at right.
Each of the clearly identified "buttons" leads to a submenu of functions designed to clean up or optimize some area of your Mac. Under the System submenu, for example, you can repair disk permissions (usually done with Disk Utility), run the daily, weekly, and monthly cron scripts for cleaning up log files, clean caches, rebuild the Launch Services database and the Spotlight Index, and update prebindings (not really necessary since OS X 10.4) and the Whatis and Locate databases.
You can also create your own batch files to run a number of the tasks at the same time, restart your Wi-Fi and flush your DNS cache, perform many user-related tasks, and more. When tasks complete, you get Growl notification.
MainMenu 2 is my Friday favorite because it puts a lot of maintenance mojo a click or two away; there's no need to use the CLI or dig into the Utilities folder, and yes, I am a very lazy person. What's your favorite Mac utility? Leave a comment!
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Ken Cohen said 3:32PM on 7-17-2009
Steven, if you were as lazy as I am, you'd run Cocktail, which uses a scheduler so I don't have to lift even one of my lazy fingers.
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coyo t said 3:51PM on 7-17-2009
if these things are as important as some seem to think I must ask why Apple still has not implemented something like it
all I can think is that they are not that important and the OS performs the tasks in the background, these things are just for folks that want to do it at a specific time of day
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Ryan said 1:59PM on 7-21-2009
I'm not a big fan of all users installing and using tools like this on a regular basis, because for the most part the OS takes care of everything itself - needlessly performing maintenance tasks such as removing caches could even have a detrimental effect on performance as the OS has to re-cache things more often than it needs to.
Still, very useful for those times where you need to troubleshoot a problem.
Binja said 3:59PM on 7-17-2009
Use OnyX. It's great.
Toss in an iDefrag from time to time while you are at it.
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Chanson said 3:59PM on 7-17-2009
MainMenu is great, but is MainMenu 2.0, at $10, really any better than MainMenu 1.7.3, which is free? As far as I can see, it offers only minimal new features and has a slightly more clunky interface.
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Y-Guy said 4:20PM on 7-17-2009
Sadly MainMenu 2.0 is not $10 its $20 (check their website) plus based on the fact there are free applications that accomplish the same task and that MainMenu was free until the new company bought it and jacked the fee up it shouldn't be your Friday favorite IMHO.
The new company added a couple near worthless features and are now trying to jack the consumer. The automatic update installs the new v2.0 but never warns the installer that it is no longer free until it is already installed.
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Aelver said 11:43PM on 7-17-2009
Yeah, I discovered this ugly truth too. Seeing as it used to be free, I think I'll uninstall and use something else. $20, what a ripoff.
Luis Menendez said 4:27PM on 7-17-2009
More than a review or favorite app, this looks like an advertisement, I like main menu, but the price should be $10 as opposed to the $20 they are charging now for an "until last month free app".
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Joshua Ochs said 4:29PM on 7-17-2009
I don't know about clunky, but it's hard to justfy $10 when so many competing programs do the same or more for free, and have reasonable user interfaces. While this may look nice, it's far from unique.
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Joshua Ochs said 4:29PM on 7-17-2009
$20 makes it that much worse. Argh!
Yoshi1080 said 4:52PM on 7-17-2009
Really, now even TUAW advertises these voodoo softwares? Onyx is known for doing more damage than good, and MainMenu seems to be the same kind. It wouldn't surprise me if 90% of the customers of these programs were Windows switchers who got bored from their flawlessly running Mac and felt the need to dig into parts of the system that they are not supposed to interact with.
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Nikax said 5:45PM on 7-17-2009
the engineering maxim is "keep fixing it until it breaks." MacOS does a pretty good job of keeping itself maintained, so why mess with it?. This looks like a GUI front end for tasks that are built into the OS and are running anyway.
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Zaxour said 10:01PM on 7-17-2009
I personally use mainmenu to run the daily/weekly/monthly maintenance scripts because I don't have my mbp on all day. I know the commands in terminal, but for whatever reason I prefer to do it in MM.
That said, I will not be upgrading as I don't feel I should have to pay for a front end to do terminal commands for me.
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Mike said 11:21PM on 7-17-2009
I use Macaroni, anyone else? It's awesome, 10 bucks and does everything you need.
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Mark West said 9:14AM on 7-18-2009
As has been stated at $20 this is not worthy of anyone's recommendation. It was a convenient menubar freebie and I would pay $5 for that convenience. But Janitor and Disk Utility will do it for free.
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nathangimpel said 12:38AM on 7-18-2009
I used this when I was free. No way I'm paying $20 for it, though. Fail on their part.
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nathangimpel said 12:39AM on 7-18-2009
When it was free. When it was free. I am but a lowly paper slave and have never been truly free.
Mark said 3:06AM on 7-18-2009
I was running the previous free version. I launch it one day, get an update notification and only after I install it am I told that 2.0 is a paid update.
Rather frustrating.
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Piticli Bonico said 3:19PM on 7-18-2009
Goodbye Main Menu 2.0!
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Jesse Levin said 10:08PM on 7-18-2009
Probably the most annoying shareware I've ever installed. It pops up requesting registration every 15 minutes. If that's the practice the company is going to have, then I'm sure their software isn't worth spit (and usually I'm not that negative about software).
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