Rating: 4.5/5

General Info: All Macs need maintenance performed. Unlike cars, they usually need software maintenance like emptying caches, repairing permissions, changing logs, and more. Cocktail does all of these things and more. Unlike Onyx, Cocktail remembers your password for doing these maintenance operations so you don’t have to type it in every launch. Cocktail can also set some useful hidden preferences not in System Preferences. While it doesn’t have the sheer number of hidden preferences that MacPilot does, it does have many of the useful ones. A feature many non-Terminal users will enjoy is that Cocktail can force empty the Trash. For the true network geeks, there are a set of advanced options for, well, your network. In most places where hidden/advanced preferences are available is the option to set them back to the defaults, just in case you mess something up.

In the ?¢‚Ǩ?ìPilot?¢‚Ǩ¬ù tab are ways to run all maintenance tasks at once and schedule them to happen automatically. Scheduling is essential functionality for apps like Cocktail. Here’s where I wanted to see more options. The Scheduler only allows you to set the day of the week or every day for maintenance tasks. The Scheduler feature needs to have a little calendar to select specific days of the month; I could then schedule tasks for the end of every month. After scheduled tasks, you can chose to Restart, Shut Down, Sleep, Logout, or do nothing (quitting Cocktail is conspicuously missing). Also nice would be the option to automatically turn off the boot chime when scheduling a Restart. Yes, my Mac rebooting can wake me up. Cocktail features interfaces to Man (sounds a bit odd), and other UNIX commands. A really neat feature Cocktail has is the ability to save very detailed reports of your Mac as a plain text or XML file. Cocktail is the fastest and easiest app I’ve used to keep my Mac in tip-top shape. For $14.95, Cocktail is a great solution.

Retail Price: $14.95

Site: http://www.maintain.se/cocktail/index.php

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 26th, 2007 at 5:47 pm and is filed under Reviews, Software, Updates, Utilities. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.