Onyx for Optimization and Maintenance

The thing we like most about our Macs is that they require very little maintenance. Despite that, the compulsion to fiddle and tweak sometimes becomes too much. Many developers have picked up on this and provided utilities to let us customize settings and even get into a few that are meant to be hidden from our prying eyes.

My favorite of this breed of apps is Onyx from Titanium Software.

About Onyx
From the Onyx blurb:

OnyX is a maintenance, optimization, and personalization utility for Mac OS X. It allows you to run misc tasks of system maintenance, to configure certain hidden parameters of the Finder, Dock, Safari, Dashboard, Exposé, Disk Utility… to delete cache, to remove a certain number of files and folders that may become cumbersome, to see the detailed info of your configuration, to preview the different logs and CrashReporter reports, and more.

Onyx has a plethora of OS X settings that can be tweaked. Some are fine for beginners, whereas others are for geeks. Onyx is password protected, you need to be an administrator level user to use it, which should at least keep out some people who don’t know what they’re doing. That said, there’s very little in Onyx that can mess up your system. Where a setting could cause problems, Onyx gives a clear warning.

It comes in three variants depending on what version of OS X you are running: Puma and Jaguar; Panther; or Tiger. It is also Universal Binary and is Donationware.

The following is a run down of the sections of Onyx.

Parameters
In the Parameters section are General (8), Finder (17), Dock (11), Dashboard and Exposé (5), Safari (11), Login (7), and Misc (13) settings. The numbers in brackets are how many settings can be tweaked.

Some of my favorites are:
- Screen capture file format can be changed any of ten formats including PNG, PDF, JPEG, GIF and TIFF.
- Path to save screen captures. This one is my favorite of all. No more cluttering the Desktop with screen captures.
- Show/Hide hidden files and folders
- Show/Hide active screen corners
- Enable/Disable Dashboard developer mode. This is the one you need if you want to drag widgets off Dashboard and onto your desktop.
- Speed of display of web pages in Safari
- Toggle whether PDFs are opened in Safari or Preview.

Maintenance
In the Maintenance section you can repair permissions; run and schedule scripts; reset different services such as Help and Spotlight; and Optimize the system.

Cleaning
The Cleaning section gives you 19 different things that can be cleaned up, including things such as caches, logs and recent items. Onyx also gives you the option to clean up just the current user or all users.

Automation
The Automation takes several of the more common maintenance and optimization tasks and puts them on one screen enabling you to perform these with one click.

Log Files
The Log Files section is a log file viewer, allowing you to view all system, application and user logs. It includes a nice option to limit the view to only the last specified number of lines.

Unix Utilities
In the Unix Utlilities section it is probably only the geeks who’ll get excited. But there are some nice features to get excited about, such as preferences checking; man viewing (no, not check out blokes, but view manual pages for Unix commands) with save to PDF and searching; a file locate command; and a system profiler. This last one is quite useful as you can copy the report as plain text.

Info
The info section shows information about your computer.

Overall
Sooner or later we all find some setting we want to change but OS X doesn’t give us any way to do so. The folder for saving screen captures is a great example. Onyx comes to the rescue, providing access to many settings that are safe for users to change, as well as providing a centralized place for running maintenance tasks.

And for anyone who prefers Aqua to the Brushed Metal appearance, that can be changed in Onyx’s preferences.

Onyxis very useful and highly recommended. 10/10