Maintenance?

I've had my iMac 21" Intel 10.7 for a little over a year. Other than keeping the Trash empty, keeping the Desktop tidy, and running Disk Utility / Repair Disk Permissions is there any other "maintenance" I need to do? I called a local Mac repair shop and they said for $99 they could run some test and "clean up" my Mac. It's running fine and seems just as fast as the day I bought it. I've looked at software such as MainMenu and Onyx, but do I really need to do anything other than the 3 items I mentioned above?

Onyx highly recommended here on the forums. Do not pay a penny. That is all you need and avoid utilities like Mackeeper, and AV software.

http://download.cnet.com/OnyX-Lion/3000-18512_4-75531645.html

And use like this:-

http://www.onyxmac.com/how-to-use-onyx-for-mac.html

OnyX isn't mandatory, and doesn't need to be run often. For the most part, the three items you mentioned are most of what you need to do.

There are two other items I'd suggest:

1. Backup. This is not really an option unless you are prepared to lose data. Someday, your hard drive WILL fail. You can use Time Machine or any other method you want, but I strongly suggest using an external had drive (or cloud-based service if you prefer) to back up at a dead minimum your Home folder, preferably everything.

2. Keep a fair amount of disk space free. Mac OS X needs lots of "elbow room" to do all the temp things it does efficiently, also for its automatic defragging and other functions. No precise amount is deemed to be the "magic number," but a lot of people use the 10-20 percent of the hard drive rule and that is good enough to keep you well out of any risk. Your Mac WILL perform very poorly if you get below a dozen or so GB of free space so I suggest making sure that you always have let's say at least 10 percent drive space free at all times. It doesn't sound like you are having this problem but if you do at some point, either do some spring cleaning or move large items (like media libraries) onto external drives (not the same ones you use to back stuff up, of course) or preserver them to some other media.

My iMac doesn't want me to use Onyx

I tried downloading and running Onyx as it is recommended by nearly everyone at Mac Forums, but my Mac tells me it is a untrusted program.
I assume this is because it is not available from the Apple Store.
If its as good as everyone says, then why isn't it downloadable from there. Personally, as a previous Windows user, I wouldn't trust the Cnet site ever, as it is full of malware.

I suspect the warning that you got was from a part of OS X called Gatekeeper. Essentially Gatekeeper relies on a digital signature which software uses to tell the system it is from a registered developer. More details here.

I understand your trepidation about the Cnet site. I have not used it for much in quite some time. Here's the direct link to the Onyx site.

As for why some legit developers choose not too be part of the Apps store suspect that for some it is a licensing issue. Most, and perhaps all, of the software in the App store allows installations on all Macs that specific user owns for one price. Obviously many developers would prefer you purchase a separate license for each machine.

One of the reasons that some top notch developers do not want their apps to be sold from the app store is the percentage that Apple takes from the sale. And they probably also don't like Apple dictating to them.

Many good apps are not sold in the app store:

Carbon Copy Cloner

SuperDuper

OnyX

(As an example)

Onyx, being free of charge, is not subject to the 30 percent "distributor" cut.

I rather suspect the dev simply doesn't want to pay the $99 per year it would cost to be in the developer program, since he doesn't charge for the apps and therefore makes no money on them.

chscag said:

One of the reasons that some top notch developers do not want their apps to be sold from the app store is the percentage that Apple takes from the sale. And they probably also don't like Apple dictating to them.

Many good apps are not sold in the app store:

Carbon Copy Cloner

SuperDuper

OnyX

(As an example)

Click to expand...

If I'm not mistaken, all apps on the Mac App Store have to run in sandboxed mode, and as such, it prevents a lot of utilities that require a certain level of OS access that sandboxed apps simply can't do.

That precludes a lot of system utilities like those you mentioned from ever appearing on the Mac App Store, even if the developer chose to register for Apple's developer program.

cwa107 said:

If I'm not mistaken, all apps on the Mac App Store have to run in sandboxed mode, and as such, it prevents a lot of utilities that require a certain level of OS access that sandboxed apps simply can't do.

That precludes a lot of system utilities like those you mentioned from ever appearing on the Mac App Store, even if the developer chose to register for Apple's developer program.

Click to expand...

I agree with cwa107, I think it's the scrutiny that the apps would go through and the limitations on what they can & cannot do that makes some of the apps not appear in the App Store..

Never thought of that. I haven't looked into how sandbox mode is implemented.

What is "Sandbox Mode"? Or maybe I don't know cause I am still on Snow Leopard.

I am sure there are better descriptions out there but this may help clear things up a bit. OS X Lion App Sandbox and its implications on applications | Eternal Storms Software - Blog. I believe there was a variant of sandbox going as far back as Leopard.

Sandbox mode (regardless of where & how it is implemented) essentially means to isolate applications in such a way that it can't access or harm anyone else. One such delineation is between Kernel and User space applications to prevent applications from wreaking havoc over hardware..

A lot of OS' (and applications) take this further by creating such delineations in userspace as well. So Google Chrome, for example, is an application that essentially sandboxes each of it's tabs so that one of them misbehaving doesn't cause problems for others or the application.

Google Android OS is another example showing this concept whereby they first start a single VM that is the manager and he launches a bunch of other VMs (one for each application) and a misbehaving application just means that you have to kill the VM and restart it again. This protects other VMs, the manager VM and the system as a whole..