We’ve looked at several utilities in the past to keep your Mac running in top condition. MacCleaning Pro from EaseUS is one of the cheaper and simpler options. It is very easy to use, mostly by virtue of it’s lack of features. As system cleaners go, this has to be the simplest.
The preferences pane, shown to the right, is quite simple and provides the ability to decide which areas MacCleaning Pro will clean old unused files from. The utility can also be configured (as shown with the slider bar at …

I’m not a big believer in the need to keep Mac optimized for speed, not in the same way as a Windows machine might need it at least. But I began having some issues with my Mac which were resulting in slowdowns and general unreliability so I went on the hunt for something that might help speed things up.

I recently reviewed VirtualBox in a previous article and gave it a good review, despite some shortcomings. Since that time I decided to try (and subsequently buy) Parallels Desktop 5 for Mac. Part of the reason for my decision to do so was simply down to the fact that VirtualBox is now maintained by Oracle and I’m no fan of Oracle. They write great database apps but they have no business at all buying MySQL (except to inhibit it’s growth) and I see no reason why they should have bought …

For many Mac OSX users there’s often occasions where you need to run some software or other that is only provided for under Microsoft Windows. The list of software for which that applies is thankfully getting smaller, but a couple of examples are paramount for me, as a web developer.

Internet Explorer 6/7/8 (though 6 doesn’t feature so often)
QuickBooks.

When I started my own business some years ago, one of the things I found the hardest was keeping track of all that client information. Everything was stored in different places, for example I might have notes from a meeting I’d had with the client last Thursday, stored in a folder somewhere on the file system. Then I’d have e-mails I’d received from them, stored in Thunderbird or MS Outlook depending on what was flavour of the month at the time. My appointments with the clients would be stored on …