AppDelete: will delete the application you choose and any associated items
Originally downloaded 12/6/06. Earlier in the year, I bought AppZapper for $10 to help delete old apps and their associated files. It works fine, but I’ve been meaning to try out CleanApp for some time now. It came out around the same time as AppZapper and gets good reviews. Now, AppDelete is here, and it sounds like the same sort of product, but with no price tag attached. From the website, it’s clear that this is the developer’s first Mac application, so I’ll tread carefully. But it’s worth trying out!
Update 2/19/07. OK, I definitely advise Mac users who have $10 to go buy CleanApp instead of using AppDelete. In my tests, AppDelete simply didn’t find all the pieces a typical Mac OS X app leaves behind when you delete the application package. For example, in several tests today, AppDelete didn’t even find and delete my preferences file. This is simply incomplete programming, I think. I keep my home folder on another partition, and AppDelete probably doesn’t handle that use case. Besides this rather critical function, AppDelete doesn’t give you any kind of preview of what it will be doing. Fortunately, it does leave a folder in the Trash showing what it found to delete. But I’d prefer to know this ahead of time. I do like AppDelete’s droplet functionality (very simple, just drag an app on its icon to invoke it), but this reveals yet another critical flaw for anyone with more than a few apps to delete at one sitting: AppDelete can’t handle more than one at a time.
As anyone who regularly reads this site knows, I’m a huge fan of good freeware, but in this case you really don’t get much for free, and a huge amount for just $10 more.
Version as tested: 1.0.2.
