Zap That App and Make Sure It’s Really Off Your Mac

Mac (OS X Tiger) Only: One of the greatest things about a Mac is removing a program is fairly simply. Click the program icon and drag it to your trash can. Empty the trash can and now it’s off your drive. Right? Well, the program is, but there are other pieces of luggage that may have been left behind such as the beauty and health bag, i.e. your preferences and support files. Take Firefox for example. It stores previous web site information, such as images, text, PDFs, cookies, and so on, all in a folder in /Library/Application Support or in your user home /Library/Application Support path. Some other programs even use more folders thus creating a nice scatter.

Most people don’t like hunting down children files just to do a clean un-install and thus AppZapper to the rescue. To get rid of all the files associated with your single program file, just drag that program to AppZapper and up comes a list of associated files. Leave them all checked if you’d like to delete them all or uncheck the ones you’d like to retain for maybe future use. Your choice. Be careful, however, unlike a similar package, CleanApp, which archives your deleted files in case you goof or tweaks something else, AppZapper really zaps your stuff goodbye. Poof! Like the animation in your trash can, it’s gone.

Another feature AppZapper has is its ZapGenie. Invoke the genie and it shows you all your installed applications on your hard drive. Check off what you want deleted and away they go, too. It’s a super-quick way of yanking stuff off your hard drive.

One of the AppZapper’s strongest features, however, in my opinion is it’s ability to uninstall system add-ons such as System Preference panes (get rid of that Microsoft Mouse pane!!), widgets, plugins (input managers, Internet plugins, QuickTime components, and iTunes visualizers), and screen savers. Very, very, cool indeed.

You can have all this power for about $12 if you’d like. Give it a try with a free download trail version today and start zapping!

Tags: mac, os x, osx, remove, application, appzapper, program, shareware