AppCleaner is an uninstallation utility that searches your hard drive for files connected to a specified application, widget, or other form of app and provides the option to delete them all at once, even if some of the app's processes are currently running.
AppCleaner offers two ways to target an app: discovery on an automatically generated searchable list of apps or, alternatively, drag and drop of a specific app file onto the AppCleaner window. App lists are separated into Application (standard .app) files, Widgets, and Other, which includes system screen savers, browser plugins, video codecs, and system preference panes. There are two additional features accessible through the AppCleaner preferences: protection of specified apps from deletion by AppCleaner and "SmartDelete", a background process that detects when apps are sent to the Trash and offers to clean out their connected files.
Sam's Protip: Purportedly, more thorough methods exist of removing all traces of an app. But these methods involve a substantial amount of digging on the user's part, so it would have to be a real need.
Pros
- Serves as the all-purpose uninstall tool Apple doesn't provide
- Rapidly loads searchable list of all applications on computer
- File protection and background monitoring features
Cons
- Does not detect fragments of apps that were already partially uninstalled through Trash
- Cannot rescind changes made to system by app (e.g. file associations)
The latest version of AppCleaner with the new cleaning or detection improvements is the best version yet.Does a very thorough job of uninstalling most apps and finds a LOT more app components than previous versions.Simply do a search for an uninstalled app with EasyFind and you will notice the latest version of AppCleaner rarely misses anything.
Best app uninstaller out there.
I like it when an app is developed to fulfill just one specific task. In this case, there are no functional extravagances to expect.