In the mood to do some housekeeping on your Mac? Onyx for your Mac can do it all, for the low, low price of free! Free is wonderful, and especially when it comes to keeping your system fresh. Onyx has been around for awhile now and with every new iteration it just keeps getting better. You can use for tasks like drive verification, system maintenance, and getting rid of extraneous files. It's been updated for Lion, so let's take a look!
You can download Onyx from the developer, Titanium Software's website.
Running Maintenance Scripts
Maintenance scripts help keep your Mac running in tip-top shape. There are scripts that your Mac automatically runs on a Daily, Weekly, and Monthly basis, but with Onyx, you can run these scripts on your own schedule.
Head over to Maintenance > Scripts. Once there, select the checkboxes for Daily Scripts, Weekly Scripts, Monthly Scripts, and if you wish, Delete System Archived Logs. Once done, click the Execute button to have Onyx run the checked scripts.
Cleaning Your Mac
If winter, spring, or whatever-season cleaning is more of your thing, you can head over to the Cleaning tab in Onyx.
In the System tab, you can have Onyx clean the following cache elements from your system:
- Boot Cache
- Kernel and Extensions
- International Preferences (Character Palatte Cache, Keyboard Viewer Cache, and more)
- CUPS Jobs
- Directory Services
- QuickTime components
- Audio components
- Other components
All of these cache items take up valuable drive space; so, depending on when you cleaned these items last, you may get back some of this disk space.
In the User tab, you can delete the following items from the cache:
- Applications
- Preferences of System Panels
- Audio Units
- Java and Applets Java
- Desktop Background
- International Preferences
- Dock Icons
- ColorSync
- QuickLook
- Temporary Items
Check the items that you wish to remove from the cache, and then click the Execute button to have the scripts run to remove the cache elements from your Mac.
The Internet tab will let you easily remove browser-specific items from your Mac without having to open your web browser. You can remove:
- Browser Cache
- Download Cache
- Browser History
- Recent Searches
- Web Page Previews
- Bookmark Icons
- Form Values
- Cookies
Note that form values and cookies (may) spare you from the typing of user names, passwords, and other required info when you revisit a Web form (like MacLife.com, and other websites). You should use these items with caution. When you are ready to delete the browser-specific items, click the Execute button.
The Fonts tab will let you remove the following items from the Fonts Cache:
- System and Users Font Cache
- Adobe Systems Font Cache
- Microsoft Font Cache
- Quark Font Cache
- Some Open Source Application's Font Cache
Note that after cleaning the font Cache of these applications, some apps may take unusually longer to open on the next launch as it rebuilds the cache. Be patient when opening applications that have recent had their caches cleared.
The Logs tab will let you clear the following Log files on your Mac:
- Log Files
- Apple Software Update Log
- Bash Log
- System Archived Logs (Deletes logs archived by maintenance scripts)
- Instant Message Logs
- User Diagnostic Reports
- System Diagnostic Reports
- Mobile Devices CrashReporter
And, finally, the Misc. tab will let you remove the following files from your Mac:
- Recent items (from the Apple menu)
- Recent conversions of Calculator
- Items in the Mail Downloads folder
- Items in the Saved Searches folder (The items in the sidebar are not deleted)
- Obsolete items
- Previous iTunes Libraries
- "My Computers" list in Screen Sharing
- QuickTime Content Guide (for pre-QuickTime X versions)
Cleaning and maintaning your Mac's OS is imperitive. Using the features of Onyx we've mentioned above is one way to keep your Mac speedy. Remember that it's always a good idea to reboot your Mac after using any of these cleaning options.
Follow this article's author, Cory Bohon on Twitter.
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