No matter how intuitive and reportedly “trouble free” Macs are to run, believe me, several months after you add hundreds of files, applications, and download thousands of webpages, your shiny new iMac or MacBook Air is going to run slower than when you first booted it out the box. That’s because like any computer, digital junk files pile up in the hard drive; and eventually it just needs to get cleaned out.
CCleaner is one such application utility that can perform cleaning operations for you. It was recently released from its beta version for Mac users, and it can now be downloaded for free in the Mac App Store, or directly from the Piriform website. Windows PC users have been making use of CCleaner for a while, and now Mac users can finally take advantage of it. The interface is similar for both platforms, but the program is of course optimized to address the particular system clutter of OS X.
While CCleaner may not be as feature rich as say similar paid programs like MacKeeper , which is what I’ve been using, it is still a very powerful hard drive clean-up utility.
Back Up & Run
First off, if you’ve never used a program like this, I strongly urge you to back up your system hard drive (Carbon Copy Cleaner or Time Machine are two easy programs to use). This precaution applies to any program that could possibly wipe out important files or undermine the performance of your computer.
What Does CCleaner Do?
CCleaner scans your hard drive and cleans out junk files that have piled up over time and use. Many of its actions can be performed with default applications in your Mac, but CCleaner performs several operations within a single interface . For example, in Safari you can click the Reset Safari menu item and selectively clear out your browser history, remove webpage preview images and website icons, etc., which in turn might improve the performance of the browser if it’s running slow.
CCleaner performs similar functions for Safari and other web browsers you use, including Firefox and Google Chrome. You can select to have it clear the Internet Cache, browser and download histories, cookies, and application cache – all from within a single interface.
You can also select to have CCleaner empty your System Trash, repair permissions (which you normally do within the built-in Disk Utility application of OS X), and completely write over unused space on your hard drive or other disks, to prevent disk recovery applications from recovering deleted files that might still remain buried in your system.
Also, when you decide to trash applications on your hard drive that you no longer use, CCleaner will not only remove your selected applications, but also their related preferences files, caches and logs that otherwise will remain on your hard drive.
How To Use CCleaner
CCleaner only removes what you tell it to. So first off, if you’ve never used a utility like this, select and deselect only items that you understand how the program will affect. Before you run the cleaning action, click the Analyze button so that CCleaner will scan your hard drive and create a list of the number of files and their sizes that it will delete.
As you read over the report list, you can uncheck items that you don’t want to be a part of the CCleaner operations.
Under the Options pane, you can also tell CCleaner to retain cookies for only selected websites. Likewise, you can select which browsers you want CCleaner to perform cookie cleaning operations on.
As far as I can tell there is no software documentation installed with this first version of CCleaner for the Mac. Nor could I find documentation on the Piriform website. However, there is plenty of documentation for the PC version of the program, which should be useful in helping you understand more about CCleaner’s capabilities.
(Via MakeUseOf.com.)
Raspberry Pi, an innovative $35 GNU/Linux box in a tiny package, launched yesterday — sort of. Demand was so hot that all the company’s retail partners collapsed under load. From Ars Technica’s Ryan Paul:
The product is a bare board with a 700MHz ARM11 CPU and 256MB of RAM. It’s roughly the size of a deck of playing cards and has a powerful GPU that is reportedly competitive with that of modern smartphones. Developer prototypes of the product have been shown running impressive graphics demos and decoding high-definition video…
At the time of publication, the Farnell website is still spitting errors. The RS site has been partially restored and is intermittently available, but isn’t currently allowing users to purchase the Raspberry Pi. Instead, it displays a screen where users can register to express their interest in the product. The Raspberry Pi foundation managed to withstand the traffic by temporarily replacing the contents of its official website with a static page.
Alongside the launch, the Raspberry Pi foundation also announced that the cheaper $25 model, which will be launched at an undisclosed future date, got a spec bump and will have 256MB of RAM, just like the $35 model. The $25 board was originally expected to have only 128MB of RAM. The cheaper model will still lack several of the features found in the $35 model, such as the built-in ethernet controller.
(Via Boing Boing.)
You’re not unpopular, it’s just the nature of the news feed. Amongst all the business-related news at FMC, Facebook revealed that the average news feed story from a user profile reaches just 16 percent of their friends. Your actively shared links, photos, and status updates probably reach much higher than 16 percent of your friends, while more inane auto-generated posts about new friendships, wall posts, and articles you read may only be seen by your closest buddies.
Overall, this is actually a good thing, because the reduced visibility of irrelevant content makes room for what you want to see. But don’t be alarmed if your all your friends don’t like that awesome concert photo, they may just be offline.
After his Q&A session about ads during the Facebook Marketing Conference, I followed up with Boland, asking if the 16 percent average distribution rate hampered communication. He defended Facebook’s news feed, saying “No, there are pieces of content you create that are interesting, and there’s some that are not.” And the 16 percent doesn’t just apply to users. Business Pages have the same average reach, which is why Facebook is launching its new “Reach Generator” to help marketers buy extra distribution of their Page posts on the ads sidebar, in the web and mobile news feed, and even on the logout page.
The stat from Director of Product Marketing Brian Boland was backed up by VP Chris Cox who said this holds true “in aggregate across all profiles, all types of content, all interactions, all ages, and all demographics.” By reducing the reach of low relevance posts, Facebook leaves news feed space for compelling wedding photos, new job announcements, funny videos, and urgent questions. Still, it means the ambient intimacy of the news feed can’t completely replace the reliability for direct communication.
(Via TechCrunch.)
Last Thursday, Apple caught us all a bit off guard with the announcement of OS X Mountain Lion, the next major version of OS X. Now that I’ve had a few days to sit down and take a look at it, I can confidently say that this is no small upgrade. Mountain Lion is a huge leap forward in the unification of iOS and OS X (Apple has officially dropped “Mac” from the name), bringing over many much-loved features including iMessages, Notification Center, AirPlay Mirror, and a whole host of new applications.
Follow along as we dive in and take a look at all of the great new features, updates and tweaks of your next operating system.
Mountain Lion is a huge leap forward for OS X
Once upon a less digital time, there existed the art of the mixtape: a tedious labor of love that required timing, taste and a penchant for musical progression. No longer in this iTunes-era, where personally curated song collections that once served as the background to our lives can now be automated by our dear friends in Cupertino. And, based on a patent application filed back in August of 2010, those Apple-made robo-playlists could get even smarter and slicker, with your perennially hip, millennial compadres being none the wiser. According to the claims covered, "an electronic device" (insert Mac or iOS product here) would be able to locate and interpret beats from a preceding AAC, MP3 or WMA file and crossfade them into those of the following track. In other words, it's a virtual disc jockey built into your machine; one that would supercede the currently available DJ feature. Whether or not this Sven Väth-like software will pan out in the company's favor remains to be seen. So, until that fateful day arrives, the creation of those fist-pumping, house mixes is better left to the few, the proud, the orange-skinned.
(Via Engadget.)
