YANK UTILITY COMPLETELY UNINSTALLS PROGRAMS

The Macintosh OS X operating system is a truly remarkable thing. As personal operating systems go, it does a terrific job of maintaining and monitoring what goes on with just about every housekeeping aspect needed to keep things running smoothly. OS X is a modern OS that Apple keeps refining, updating and tweaking, making sure that it's always up to the demands of the current as well as the newer hardware and software. Of course like every other OS out there, it's not perfect and never will be. There's always room for improvement and that's what keeps things interesting. When there's a need for something not provided by the operating system, it's an opportunity for third party developers to make it happen.

Take uninstalling a program for example. You would think that uninstalling something would be easy. Just remove the files you installed and throw them in the Trash. But there's a problem with that simple solution. Typically it isn't you who installs a program. Usually programs come with something called an installer. An installer is a program that copies the software from the installation CD to your hard drive. The trouble is that you really don't know what the installer did after it's finished. You don't know how many files were installed by the installer and you don't know where all of them were placed. When you install something new, rarely is the application just one single file. An installation can literally place hundreds of software components that may be scattered in just as many different places across your hard drive. So how do you know what and where they all are? Unless the installer leaves you a detailed description, you're pretty much out of luck. And even if it does, you still can't be completely sure about its accuracy. To make matters worse, there's really nothing that's readily available within the Apple OS that gives you that information. So after you install something and decide you want to remove it, you can only hope that the developer included an Uninstall feature within the installer. If not, you were pretty much out of luck. Yes you could remove the big, obvious application file but the rest of it was doomed to stay on your hard drive until the end of time. These orphaned files may not cause any problems but they still take up space and could even cause problems down the road. You really need to get them removed and now there's something out there that can help you delete everything once and for all.

Yank is from Matterform Media, it's billed as "Your Mac's Uninstaller" and that's pretty much what it does. Before you install something new, make sure you have Yank installed and running. Yank uses Matterform's proprietary "Sonar technology" that watches what happens during the installation process. As an installer does its thing, Yank logs all file system changes and records everything to a Yank uninstall file specific to that program. Every detail regarding the installation process is recorded there. So if and when the time comes to remove that program, Yank will access the Yank log made for that program and literally use the information stored there as a kind of road map that points out what was installed and where. Now it's just a matter of finding all of those files and removing them and that's exactly what Yank does. It's a simple answer to a complex problem and it works amazingly well.

Finally, what happens if you want to uninstall a program that you installed before you acquired Yank? Matterform Media maintains a free Yank file sharing service where you can locate Yank log files created by other users. Chances are someone used Yank for your program. Just download the log file and your copy of Yank will use it to delete your pre-Yank program.

There are other uninstall utilities out there but they can miss something and even misidentify and delete a shared component that should not be removed. If that happens you could be in a world of hurt so be careful and make sure your hard drive is backed up before using anything that deletes.

Yank is for any Mac running OS X, sells for $19.95 and is available directly from the Matterform website.

www.matterform.com

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