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Friday Favorite: MainMenu 2 keeps your Mac running smoothly

by Steven Sande Jul 17th 2009 at 3:15PM

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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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...
 

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21 Comments

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Craig

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

July 19 2009 at 4:27 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Jesse Levin

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).

July 18 2009 at 10:08 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Piticli Bonico

Goodbye Main Menu 2.0!

July 18 2009 at 3:19 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Mark

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.

July 18 2009 at 3:06 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
nathangimpel

I used this when I was free. No way I'm paying $20 for it, though. Fail on their part.

July 18 2009 at 12:30 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to nathangimpel's comment
nathangimpel

When it was free. When it was free. I am but a lowly paper slave and have never been truly free.

July 18 2009 at 12:39 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Mark West

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.

July 17 2009 at 11:05 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Mike

I use Macaroni, anyone else? It's awesome, 10 bucks and does everything you need.

July 17 2009 at 11:02 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Zack P

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.

July 17 2009 at 10:01 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Nikax

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.

July 17 2009 at 5:45 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Yoshi1080

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.

July 17 2009 at 4:52 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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