One wrong click and you could find your computer working very differently-or not working at all. (The fact that many tweaking utilities require your admin-level username and password to run should be a big red flag.) Although these apps can perform benign actions such as enabling the Dock’s hidden options, they can also do more serious things such as deleting virtual memory swap files, deleting preferences files, and munging low-level network settings. That said, the concomitant risk of these utilities is that some of them place dangerous tools in the hands of inexperienced users. For these users, tweaking utilities provide easy access to those features OS X has hidden beneath the surface. Their Unix skills are limited to copying a command from a Web site, pasting it into Terminal, and pressing the Return key-and they’re perfectly OK with being such Terminal neophytes. I happen to live in the real world, where most of the people who use these utilities would never, ever, ever pick up a book on Unix. Now, some “purists” feel that such utilities are a scourge upon the earth, since, in their minds, these utilities keep people from actually learning about Unix and the shell. Since I’m often asked which ones I recommend, I decided it was time to check out as many as I could to see if any stand out. Over the past couple years, I’ve seen more and more of these tweaking utilities crop up, many of them very similar to others on the market. As a group, I call these software titles “tweaking” utilities because they help you tweak your Mac’s features and performance. These utilities also tend to let you perform several “maintenance” tasks that may or may not be effective (that’s the topic for another article). There are many of these software titles out there for Mac OS X, but they all have one thing in common: They offer ways to access settings and features of Mac OS X that aren’t easily available via the standard interfaces-System Preferences, applications, and various preferences dialogs. You read about them on message boards and Web sites, in chat rooms and email: Someone’s Mac is having problems, and a helpful soul writes, “Download XYZ and clean your caches.” Or a user wants to know how to tweak a specific setting in Mac OS X, and several people chime in with suggestions for obscurely named utilities such as Onyx, DoktorKleanor, and TinkerTool.
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