Uninstalling Apps, The Easy Way
By: Wardy Miller

One of the first questions that I get asked by new Mac users is “how do I delete unwanted programs?” The answer can be a little tricky. Most programs can be dragged to the trash can to be removed, because the Mac operating system has nothing like the windows registry to clean up; however, doing an uninstall this way can leave you with orphaned preference files.

So what is the Macintosh equivalent to the Windows Add/Remove Programs solution? The answer is there are quite a few choices. There is App Zapper at $12.95 US with free updates for life. App Zapper works very well and is fairly cheap. The next application that I tried was AppDelete. Even though the site calls it donation ware, after a fixed number of uninstalls it will force you to pay for the application. (That is shareware if you ask me.) Even though the minimum donation is $5.00 US, that is a cheap price to pay for a pretty good application. The last one that I will discuss is AppTrap. AppTrap is a free, open source application, that installs into your System Preferences tool panel, and you start the service, it is easy as that. When you delete an application by dragging it to the trash can, AppTrap checks to see if there are any files associated with it and gives you the opportunity to delete them too.

So there you have it. Three very good (yet inexpensive) applications to remove unwanted programs.