This shareware utility is kind of a mishmosh of functionality, sort of TinkerTool-esque, but give a convienient one-stop shop for all of the OS's maintenance scripts, alternate finder settings and whatnot.

What's worth the price of admission is forcing the side-dock appearance onto the bottom dock, getting rid of the gay 3-D one. I really was having trouble seeing the active app lights. When you use the side-dock style, they're much more visible. I also kind of like showing hidden apps as transparent icons.

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What's worth the price of admission is forcing the side-dock appearance onto the bottom dock, getting rid of the gay 3-D one. I really was having trouble seeing the active app lights. When you use the side-dock style, they're much more visible. I also kind of like showing hidden apps as transparent icons.

TinkerTool does all that for free.

Cocktail does it for free too, along with a bunch of other stuff. If you pay the $15 shareware fee, you unlock some functionality like being able to put your maintenance cron tasks on your own schedule (many people shut down their computers and so the normal maintenance scripts never run), as well as periodically clearing caches, cookies, internet history. It will do a lot of these things for free too... but if you want that set it and forget it functionality, it's worth a piddly 15 bucks. It's nothing you can't do from the terminal yourself, but I for one prefer GUI to the command line.

I have both TinkerTool and Cocktail, even though there's always been some overlap. The thing that pisses me off about Tinkertool, is that it fools you into thinking you can change interface fonts... when really this has never worked in the Finder, where I want it the most.

Another app along similar lines is Xupport. It's not free, but it does allow you to pretty much evaluate it forever.

Speaking of utilities...

Just FYI, because I know that a number of you have already got aboard the Leotard Express, but I missed customizing my Dock background (and some other attributes of the Dock as well) in Tigard via TransparentDock, which is an app that was killed by Safari 3. But I just found ClearDock which is available free from Insanity that does at least some of the basics. You haven't had real Dock legibility until you've tried a charcoal gray as a background and solid white for the running application triangles. But, good god, I'd never actually make the Dock background transparent. That would truly be insane...and quite illegible, but to each his own.

Speaking of extraordinarily useful and spiffy utilities, I really like the very free-from, non-anal Note Pad Deluxe. I wish more Apple shareware was of this quality and style. This is not junk-drawer software, but it's mean to accommodate a casual, junk-door approach to storing bits of data that don't really perhaps fit anywhere else and aren't worth opening some big honkin' program just to jot down a quick note.