Joli Bellew's Degunking Your
Mac is a modestly priced book that really can help you get
more out of your Mac and iPod, and there is nothing else quite like
it in Macintosh books.
The Tiger Edition has grown by 129 pages from the 1st edition's
267 pages to 396, and none of the new content is padding. OS X
10.4 "Tiger" includes more than 200 new features, and several of
them - notably the Dashboard, Spotlight, Smart Folders, and the
Automator - merit detailed coverage. Degunking Your Mac
provides good, concise instruction and tips on using these Tiger
technologies.
The scope of the book has also been expanded to cover Degunking
Your iPod, a topic that was not addressed at all in the original
edition. If you're an iPod owner, the information in this chapter
alone could be worth the book's price, which remains at $24.99.
The downside for low-enders is that the chapter on Optimizing
OS 9 has been dropped from the Tiger Edition, which has just a
three-page overview on using Classic Mode. If you're an OS 9
holdout, it might be worth your while getting a first edition of
the book.
Of the material carried
over, much of it has been enhanced, updated, and expanded. Besides
the new Degunking Your iPod chapter, there are new chapters on the
Degunking the Dashboard; Degunking iChat, VoiceOver, and QuickTime
7; and using the Automator.
But perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself. Those reading this
review may not be familiar with the first edition of Degunking
Your Mac, so let's take a look at the basic concept of computer
degunking.
Life could be described as an exercise in imposing order on
chaos with varying degrees of success. Computer stewardship is a
microcosm of this. More succinctly, it's an ongoing battle against
gunk.
Gunk is life's inevitable clutter, be it mental, material, or
digital. Around your home, it is characterized by things like rain
gutters getting clogged with debris; the garage, basement, attic,
and back porch filling up with assorted junk; broken tools and
appliances; slow drains; leaky faucets; and chimneys that need
sweeping.
In your mind, gunk is the distractions, digressions, and ennui
that often result in your putting off cleaning the gutters or
addressing other needful exigencies.
Your Mac gets gunked up, too. Obsolete or
unwanted files clutter up your directories; you upgrade software
and forget to uninstall or trash the previous version(s), your
email archives fill up with spam that you don't get around to
deleting - or just obsolete and no longer relevant messages. You
put off running Repair Permissions and cron maintenance scripts, or
perhaps you don't even know these routines exist.
Paraglyph Press President and publisher Keith Weiskamp comments:
"A lot of Mac users didn't believe us when we first said that Macs
accumulated gunk like any other computer. But the huge success of
Degunking Your Mac showed us that even with a rock-solid
operating system such as Tiger, Mac computer users can still
benefit from some basic, no-nonsense, degunking advice. Joli has
once again written a top-notch book that clears up the mysteries of
Tiger and helps all readers maximize the power that's been built
into this incredible OS."
The effect of gunk is that your Mac's performance will suffer
and the chaos will sabotage your efficiency and productivity.
Programs and processes will run slower and slower, and you will
waste more and more valuable time looking for files that you know
are there but can't find in the clutter.
The purpose of the book is to get you up to speed on
gunk-tackling as quickly and painlessly as possible. The author,
Joli Ballew, is a community college software teacher and graphic
artist who has written several computer books.
While Degunking Your Mac is a comprehensive and thorough
tutorial in its titular topic, in the real world, people may only
have a limited amount of time to devote to computer degunking.
Consequently, the book's chapter content is sensibly preceded by a
capsule "Degunking with Time Limitations" section including
formulae for 10-minute, 30-minute, one-hour, three-hour, and
half-day degunking projects as well as catch-as-catch-can spare
moment degunking. These will get you started. There is also a
12-step degunking program that shows you how to get your Mac
operating at optimum speed in 12 easy steps.
Interspersed throughout the main text you will find many
"Gunkbuster's Notebook" sidebars with extra detail and tips on
topics like cleaning up digital camera gunk, finding and deleting
duplicate files, cleaning up after downloads and decompression,
using the Shared Folder as a gunkbuster, using Spotlight as a
supplementary Help option, watching out for malicious third-party
widgets, and so forth.
...email has become one of the biggest gunk
magnets on planet....
While I doubt that many nonprofessional Mac users will take Ms.
Bellew's advice about using FTP in lieu of email attachments, I
hope that her suggestion to use plain text rather than formatted or
HTML email will find receptive ears. As she notes, email has become
one of the biggest gunk magnets on planet, and things like
gratuitous attachments and text formatting are a big part of the
problem.
Degunking Your Mac is a very useful resource that shows
you how to keep your computer reasonably organized and
clutter-free.
Over the years I've developed my own degunking protocols and
routines that work pretty well for me, but I know a lot of folks
who just don't bother. It's amazing that some people's Macs run at
all, let alone continue providing tolerably good service despite
being cumbered with vast accretions of gunk. The fact that the Mac
is such a solid, robust platform combined with the general lack of
having to deal with the endless virus/malware onslaught that
besieges PC-users allows Mac folks to get away with slovenly
computer-keeping habits.
There are degrees of gunk-tolerance, and what for one user would
be a demoralizing mess of gunkiness might just another's
comfortable chaos. My Desktop is an example. I typically will have
somewhere between 100 to 200 icons scattered about in what would
appear to the casual observer to be no particular order. However, I
pretty much know where everything is, and I find that keeping work
in progress out where I can see it is preferable to rooting around
the through folders or using Spotlight. Once a project is completed
and no longer current, it does get shunted to archive folders, for
which I keep aliases on the Desktop for quick and convenient
access.
On the other hand, I am fairly obsessive about trashing
transiently outdated or obsolete stuff, routinely throwing unwanted
gunk away, weeding email boxes regularly, and upgrading programs
systematically and deleting older versions. I keep my working files
organized in a few key folders and try to run a system maintenance
utility at least every two weeks or so. This regimen works pretty
well, but it's the result of more than a dozen years conditioning,
trial and error, and habit.
My point is that you should degunk regularly, but you need to
find a comfort zone that works practically for you. This book can
help you do that.
It also bears emphasizing that degunking goes far beyond just
getting rid of unwanted clutter and chaos; it includes system
maintenance, keeping your system and applications updated, and data
backups, all of which are addressed at some length in Degunking
Your Mac.
Here's a concise chapter overview:
Chapter 1, Is My Mac Really Gunked Up?, is an
introductory overview of the book's content, including a discussion
of what gunk his, what the experts know, understanding how your Mac
gets gunked up, and preparing you for degunking.
Chapter 2, Degunking Your Mac, gets down to business with
a systematic degunking strategy, that includes organizational
techniques for files and folders, cleaning the Desktop and Finder
windows (or in my case not), organizing email, disabling
unnecessary components, upgrading software (and hardware), backups,
maintenance, and more.
Chapter 3, is called Getting Rid of Files That Shouldn't Be
There, starting with your Home folder and its subfolders. The
next order of business is to clean up your Desktop. Despite
appearances, this is actually something I do several times a day.
If I didn't, things would quickly get out of hand.
Ms. Ballew suggests throwing away software installer files,
which is fine as long as you are sure you will never want to
reinstall the program. My practice is to keep installers for
current versions of all programs I use, as well as system version
upgrades. It takes up a lot of hard drive space, but I'm on a
dialup Internet connection with no local access to broadband, so
there is a lot of online time invested in installer downloads. I
keep the installer files on a separate hard drive partition from my
operating system.
Chapter 3 also covers cleaning up other folders, managing the
Shared folder, the hard disk window, the user's toolbar, deleting
obsolete user accounts, tracking down elusive temporary files, and
managing aliases.
Chapter 4 is about Uninstalling Programs You Don't Need (and
Tweaking Those You Do). This sounds pretty
straightforward and commonsensical, but it's amazing how quickly
old versions of programs that have been installed or updated
accumulate in the Applications folder. Also covered is deleting
preferences files from deleted programs. The second part of the
chapter is concerned with tuning the programs you want to keep by
optimizing performance settings, view settings, and getting the
most out of the Classic, Carbon, and Cocoa environments in
OS X.
Chapter 5, Organizing Your Remaining Files and Folders,
is about organizing and personalizing the Home folder, the Desktop,
Documents, Photos, Music, Movies folders and so forth, using the
Mac OS Labels feature as an organizing tool, compressing and
archiving, using the search bar and Find to find stray files, and
another discussion about hard drive defragmenting.
In Chapter 6, we Clean Up the Dock, Finder, and Menu Bar,
removing superfluous icons and adding useful ones, tailoring the
various Dock appearance and behavior features to your taste,
cleaning up and personalizing Finder windows, and managing Menu
Extras.
Chapter 7, Degunking The Dashboard, is new to the Tiger
Edition, and covers removing Dashboard and Widget Bar gunk,
positioning widgets efficiently, and setting Dashboard preferences,
as well as tips on personalizing your Dashboard widgets and
locating and installing useful third-party widgets.
Chapter 8, Degunking iChat, VoiceOver, and QuickTime 7,
addresses degunking these three Tiger technologies.
Fonts and Font Gunk get a chapter all their own - Chapter
9, which is a tutorial on font management, including use of the
Font Book application, disabling fonts, and moving fonts from OS
9.
Chapter 10, Degunking Your iPod, is my favorite of the
completely new chapters in Degunking Your Mac, Tiger
Edition. A large proportion of Mac users these days have iPods,
and its inclusion is very welcome and appropriate in the context of
the degunking. In this chapter Ms. Bellew, an iPod fan, explains
how to keep your iPod in sync with your Mac manually so you have
full content control; organize your iPod with playlists, use your
iPod as a PDA, connect your iPod to a TV, home theater system, or
your car stereo, and use your iPod as a backup hard drive, a USB
flash drive, or a Mac FireWire disk. There's also a sidebar on iPod
troubleshooting, specific tips on using iPod photo, and using the
Copy To Play command to degunk shuffled playlists.
Chapter 11, Preventing Spam Gunk, covers preemptive
countermeasures against email gunk accumulation, its primary
suggestion being to set up at least three different email
addresses: primary, backup, and disposable, plus tips on "safe
emailing" to avoid as much as possible getting on spammers' mailing
lists. These techniques do work. I have email accounts that I've
used daily for years to communicate with only a few select
associates and family, and they never get any spam.
There is also a section on making good use of OS X Mail's
junk email filtering features as well as using third-party
spam-filtering utilities.
Chapter 12 continues on with instructions and tips on
Cleaning Up E-mail Gunk, such as reorganizing your address
book, managing email folders, dealing with attachments, plus
suggestions for efficient and considerate emailing.
Chapter 13, Optimizing Your Hard Drive, tells you how to
degunk the startup process, fixing problem software, repairing bad
memory, enhancing hard disk performance, and other ways to tweak
your system.
Chapter 14, Staying Organized and Up-to-Date, covers
software updates, configuring the Mac OS Energy Saver, plug-ins,
using the System Profiler, configuring Exposé a in Panther,
creating a Desktop printer, and getting a .mac account.
Chapter 15, The Best Hardware for Mac Degunking, shows
how and why to add more memory, adding backup devices, using CD and
DVD burners, adding a second monitor, upgrading USB, physically
cleaning hardware like keyboards, mice, monitors, and the
computer's external case. There is also a section on deciding when
it makes sense to purchase a new computer and how to transfer your
files and settings when you do.
Chapter 16, Maintenance and Troubleshooting Tools,
explains how to check the file system for errors, deleting Library
caches, running Disk Utility, zapping the PRAM, and there are a few
notes on third-party maintenance applications.
Chapter 17 is about Improving Security - things like
securing the login process, hiding the restart and shut down
buttons, creating screen saver passwords, using OS X's built-in
firewall and Secure Empty Trash features, creating visitor
accounts, using antivirus software, configuring Safari for
security, and using File Vault.
Chapter 18, Backing Up Precious Files, discusses various
backup techniques, and some of the better-known backup programs,
backing up to CDs and other backup devices, and storing
backups.
Chapter 19, Using Automator, explains what Automator is,
using the Automator to your best advantage, downloading new
Automator actions, and discovering the uses for Automator.
Finally, there are an appendix, Troubleshooting Your Mac with
Degunking Techniques, and a nine-page index.
For its target readership, which is novice to intermediate Mac
users, Degunking Your Mac contains a wealth of useful and
helpful information on computer chaos management and maintaining
optimum performance. If you're a Mac veteran, there's a lot here
that you're probably already up to speed on, but check out those
chapters on the iPod and the new Tiger features.
I really like the
book's 40s/50s retro-themed cover design, and I think the winsome
model in the cover photo is even more fetching than the lass that
graced the first edition's cover (it could be the same girl in a
different shot).
Ironically, the book's internal page design could use some
degunking of its own. There are way too many font styles and sizes,
and the layout is busy and more than a bit crowded, which makes the
book less of a pleasure to use than it might have been.
Also, classic iMac cartoon
mascot's use throughout the book is a bit out of date in a work
that is based on degunking OS X 10.4. How about a Mac
mini?
But don't let these minor aesthetic criticisms deter you from
checking out Degunking Your Mac if the topics sound like
stuff you need to know more about. There is nothing else quite like
it on the Mac bookshelf.
- Degunking Your Mac, Tiger Edition
- Joli Ballew
- Publisher: Paraglyph Press
- July 2005
- ISBN: 1-933097-05-1
- 350 pages, $24.99 US, $36.99 CA
