I spent some of my long weekend doing some maintenance on all my computers. When it came to my Mac, there wasn’t much to do, although I noticed the hard drive space was slowly filling up. Going through all my folders I deleted quite a bit of useless files that I didn’t need anymore, and proceeded to make backups of my important files. That helped, but certainly there was something else I could do to regain some space.
That is when I remembered a tool I used when I first installed Leopard to remove all the unwanted language files from the system. That application is called Monolingual. This application will go through the operating system and remove language resources that you direct it to. I set it to remove everything except for English, and I got back a whopping 3.9GB of space on my hard drive. That is quite impressive!
The best part is this application is free, and is something you really don’t have to use but every once and a while. Give it a download and reclaim some of your valuable drive space.
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.
With the first day of July upon us, today seems to be the day that more info about the upcoming iPhone 3G release is surfacing. With that being said, the hype over the release has really increased. I thought I would list some of the recent news to make it easier to sort through.
AT&T posts videos on purchasing iPhone 3G. There are also other videos that show other tips like how to hand your old phone down to someone, and upgrades for existing users.
It was also announced that the iPhone 3G will be available at 8am on July 11th. Last year it was 6pm, and I can only presume this is because of the required in-store activation. As I said, the AT&T price plans are generating a lot of debate, mainly because of the dropping of included text messaging and the increased cost. What is your opinion of the plans? Will they affect your plans to purchase or upgrade to an iPhone 3G?
I work from my home office, which obviously has many advantages, but being able to connect to co-workers and others across the United States, or the world, can sometimes pose a challenge. E-mail and Instant Messaging is essential, but being able to send large documents and media has always been a bit of a catch. It’s hard to know what the attachment limit is for the e-mail provider you use, and I can’t count how many times I have e-mail rejected because of large file attachments.
There are several ways to upload files and get them to another person. The first thing that comes to mind is FTP, but not everyone has their own server, and for some FTP might be too complicated. There are also many sites you can upload files to, but I just don’t trust these services especially with sensitive information. Another issue is even if you upload the file somewhere, figuring out the exact link can also be a bit of work aadepending on which solution you use. I often have to transfer large media files via FTP to a colleague, and with all the sub-directories I have the file is usually translated into a very long url. Not real friendly.
At WWDC this year all the attention and hype was dedicated to the iPhone 3G, but think many overlookedthe announcement of MobileMe. MobileMe was announced as the replacement for .Mac and introduced many new features and labeled it as “Exchange for the rest of us”. I was never a customer of .Mac, I just personally didn’t see the value in it unless you had several Macs to keep synced, which I did not. MobileMe caught my eye mainly for the fact that it will sync my e-mail, contacts, and calendars among multiple devices, including the iPhone and my Windows PC.
Apple also showed off the new web applications that will be launched with MobileMe. This really peaked my interest as it has a unified interface so regardless of what platform I am on, I will have the same experience. At least that is what I am hoping. That pretty much convinced me that MobileMe would be worth the investment, so my step was a trip to the Apple Store.
iBoughtAMac aims to deliver a well rounded collection of information for the Mac user. You've got questions, iBoughtAMac hopes to have the answers. If, after browsing the archives your question has not yet been answered, shoot us a friendly email at help@iboughtamac.com.
