09/02/11 09:33:48 ¶ ●

Do things to your OS X you never knew you could do with Cocktail 5

One of my favourite “tweaking” tools has recently been updated to a new major version, which mainly brings Lion compatibility: Cocktail. I’m using this app for a long time. Mainly because this app is not just one of those apps who “clean” your system (which you don’t really have to do¹)
Cocktail does, for me, things like:

• Reset view options of specific folders to their defaults. (Delete .DS_Store files)
• Rebuild Launch Services database, in case your “Open With” menu goes bonkers.
• Rebuild Spotlight index.
• Force empty cache. If you really ever need to.
• Find corrupted preference files.
• Save a couple of Gigabytes of disk space by deleting unnecessary language packs from apps. (I never spoke Klingon very fluently.)
• Change Network settings very precisely. On some network connections it might become necessary to tweak MTU, TCP and UDP settings, Cocktail gives you a nice interface to change these.
• Change interface settings:
  • Change settings for “When application crash” to, e.g., “Never annoy me when an app crashes.”.
  • Use expanded dialogs by default.
  • Change “Help Viewer” to not be on always on top.
  • Change default screenshot file format.
  • Show invisible files.
  • More Finder settings.
• Automate cleanup tasks the system usually does late at night.

That plus a couple more things made me buy a lifetime license. (A lifetime license upgrade is a measly €3.5 ($5) upgrade)