TUAW's Daily Mac App: AppCleaner

Last week on the Daily Mac App we featured the infamous uninstaller AppZapper. Today we've got a fully-featured free alternative, AppCleaner.

Available from FreeMacSoft, the freeware (donations accepted) AppCleaner does what it says on the tin. Just like AppZapper, you can drag-and-drop the offending application onto AppCleaner to locate and delete all the associated files. Alternatively you can hit the Applications, Widgets or Others tabs to find and delete things directly from AppCleaner. "Others" thankfully includes Preference Panes, so you can get rid of any unwanted additions to your System Preferences with ease.

So far so good, it does exactly what AppZapper does, but it's free. AppCleaner does have one unique feature, however, and that's "SmartDelete." An option in the preferences, SmartDelete allows you to carry on deleting apps the way Apple intended by just sending them to the trash, but with the added benefit of trashing all the associated files automatically. While SmartDelete is running, AppCleaner is supposed to detect that you've trashed an app and offer to find the associated files for you. I couldn't get it to work, but free's free right?

If you want to get rid of some applications you've installed but never use, AppCleaner does the job fine. It may not be the most comprehensive Mac cleaning app out there, but as uninstallers go, AppCleaner is free and works great.

Perhaps with Lion landing soon, now is the time to start clearing out the cobwebs and get your Mac ready for the shiny new OS X 10.7.

Thanks to brijazz for the suggestion.

View Tags

Source: http://www.freemacsoft.net/AppCleaner/

Categories

Software Mac

Last week on the Daily Mac App we featured the infamous uninstaller AppZapper. Today we've got a fully-featured free alternative,...

Add a Comment

Sign in »

5 Comments

Filter by:

dalegattis

Why the infamous uninstaller AppZapper.
infamous is an adjective which mean FAMOUS in a BAD way!
well known for some bad quality or deed : an infamous war criminal.
• wicked; abominable : the medical council disqualified him for infamous misconduct.
• historical Law (of a person) deprived of all or some citizens' rights as a consequence of conviction for a serious crime.

Should we avoid the ap?

June 23 2011 at 8:48 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to dalegattis's comment

Dr. Sam Gibbs

AppZapper has gotten a bad rep for being abandonware. It's not a bad app by any stretch of the imagination, but it's nice to have options like AppCleaner

June 24 2011 at 5:48 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Hans van den Broek

I've been using AppCleaner for quite some time, and it's great. SmartDelete not only does what it promises, but the "associated files" feature has an unexpected benefit: I wasn't happy with the latest version of Skype on my iMac, so I used Time Machine to go back to the previous version. No problem. But when I wanted to install Skype on another Mac, I found out that I didn't have the dmg anymore, and I couldn't find a download for the old version. So I used AppCleaner to find the associated files on the iMac, cancelled the operation, and moved the older Skype version and the associated files to the other Mac. Perfect.

June 23 2011 at 8:35 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

QuarterSwede

Excellent! I've been looking for an AppZapper replacement. I only wish it were on the Mac App Store for the auto updates though. That's a bummer.

June 23 2011 at 5:44 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Rembert

I'm using AppCleaner for quite some years already and I always delete my apps the way Apple intended it to do: by trashing them. AppCleaner always asked me to remove all associated files. However, when updating an app, the old app is deleted and the new one is installed: AppCleaner does recognize this and asks the user if he wants to delete all associated files but does remind the user he might be just upgrading and would like to keep the associated files (typically configuration data).

With every new OS-X install, AppCleaner is about the first program I install on the Mac.

June 23 2011 at 3:20 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply