uApp 1.3
Reviewed by Harry {doc} Babad
Developer: MacXeagle — uApp Support: I could find no contact for support. http://www.eagle-of-liberty.com/uapp/ System Requirements: Mac OS X 10.4 or later. Released: December 9, 2006 Audience: All user levels Strengths: uApp is extremely clean and simple and effective. It does exactly what its developer claims Weaknesses: Although Intuitive to use, the instructions on the developers web page are initially in French; but you’re a click away from an English translation. The software was tested on a 1 GHz dual processor PowerPC G4 Macintosh with 2 GB DDR SDRAM running under OS X 10.4.8. Product and company names and logos in this review may be registered trademarks of their respective companies. Disclaimer: When briefly reviewing share-freeware I will often use the developer’s product, functions and features descriptions. All other comments are strictly my own and based on testing. |
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Publisher’s Summary
uApp allows you to uninstall applications and all their components, with a simple drag & drop. The product does a full or partial deinstallation removing all application’s components (caches, libraries, preferences,...) are also deleted. Uninstall in security — You can lock applications (iApps, launched Apps, and Apps of your choice)
Introduction
As I noted in the DesInstaller review in this issue, I am a sucker for testing “like-me” applications. Since a number of free applications to remove files installed by .dmg packages have appeared, I thought reviewing one more would be fun. There’s now even a shareware product, CleanApp 2.2.2, but that review must wait until I get permission from its reviewer.
Working With
Installing this application is simple. Open its .dmg, and drag it you’re your applications folder. To test the application I reinstalled a number of shareware items I’d previously deleted with AppZapper. Then I used uApp to make them go away, after playing with them for a few minutes. Why? I wanted to make sure that there were indeed preferences files, and if appropriate cache files for the newly installed application, available on my hard drive.
Using uApp is as easy as 1 and 5 or 1-5, depending on how informed you want to be.
1. Drag, simply drag — Just drag many applications or folders that contain applications. 2. Looking for their components — This is time to wait (about 4 seconds, it depends of the number of dragged applications). 3. uApp is searching for applications components (Caches, Preferences, Receipts, ...) ! 4. Use the Gear-Gear!— You can select and deselect components by types. 5. Delete, that's all! — Just click on "Delete", and selected components are immediately deleted |
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You can lock applications in the preferences pane so no one messes with them. Note: You do have separate accounts, not as administrators, for the teenagers and other newbies or experimenters in your Mac’s life?
The documents you created by a deleted application are safe so that you can still use them in another application. Think Word Perfect 3.5e whose documents can be translated with MacLinksPlus or opened, with downloaded filters, in MS Word.
Discomfort
I’ve only found one thing that troubles me about this product. If you want to delete more than one application at a time, you must shift click each one in you applications folder, and drag the selected items to the uApp window. I could no way to add a second application after having dragged the first one.
Conclusions
What can I tell you? The application worked well, and did a thorough job of deleting unwanted applications and their chaff. Although I marginally prefer AppZapper because of its ZapGenie feature, which allows me to find installed applications by last used date. This should not be a deciding factor for most of you. I add a lot of stuff to my hard drive as part of testing software and don’t always remember to toss stuff that’s just taking up space.
PS
I wish I had a way to contact the developer to complement him/her on a fine piece of programming.
PPS
This is the first application I’ve installed that allow me to move the application of an alias of the applications folder found in the installer package. Wow!
