Under the elegant, easy-to-use interface of Mac OS X lies a time-tested, powerful, industrial-stength foundation, called UNIX. It’s rugged, secure, and stable, which is why most servers that run all the time run UNIX.

As UNIX is designed to run 24/7/365, it finds a little time in the middle of each night (when all but the most sleep-deprived computer fanatics are fast asleep) to do a bit of housekeeping. Since many Mac users don’t leave their Macs running all night, these housekeeping chores are seldom accomplished. In order to trigger these tasks during “bankers hours”, one must know the proper commands to enter into the Terminal window. Geek alert! Geek alert!

Rather than deal with all this Geek-level know-how, you can just use Cocktail, a shareware application available HERE. Cocktail does the geek stuff for you, while you just click buttons in the easy-to-use interface.

The maintenance scripts that Cocktail can run for you clean and delete files that are stored deep inside the bowels of Mac OS X. Again, without getting too geeky, these files are created and modified during everyday use and help the operating system keep track of what’s on it, where it is, and how to get to it. Similar to the browser cache in Safari, Mac OS X creates cache files to speed up the loading of some applications. Cocktail can clean these cache files, as well as internet caches for Safari and other browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox, OmniWeb, Netscape, Opera, Mozilla, and Camino.

Cocktail allows you to perform these tasks individually or in combination, and manually or scheduled at a time or interval of your choosing. Running all the Cocktail maintenance scripts takes on average about five minutes.

Besides scheduled maintenance, Cocktail can manage system and interface modifications. You can use Cocktail to import Internet Explorer, Netscape, or Mozilla favorites into Safari, disable the caching of favicons, increase the limit of sites kept in History above Safari’s default limit, and show the Debug menu in Safari. You can change the default file format when a Screenshot is taken (from .png to, say, .jpg), optimize network settings, and customize the look and features of the Finder and Dock.
You can download and install Cocktail for free, and it will run in Demo mode until the tenth launch, when you’ll need to pony up $14.95 for a license and free lifetime updates.

© 2006 Peter F. Zimowski