The Wizards of OS X

Dorothy pulls back the curtain to reveal the Wizard at the controls. He reacts as he sees Dorothy. Dorothy questions him. The Wizard starts to speak into the microphone, then turns weakly back to Dorothy. Camera pulls back slightly as the Lion, Scarecrow and Tin Man enter and stand behind Dorothy...
 - The Wizard of Oz by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, Edgar Allen Woolf
   (cutting continuity script taken from printer's dupe March 15, 1939)

OS X software archives are riddled - polluted - with 'Wizard of Oz' apps that do little more than hide old men behind curtains. They look like magic but give you precious little you don't already have. Their only possible allure lies in your not knowing you already have it.

System Optimisers

Most of the system tweakers and optimisers do little more than give you back your 'defaults' command line tool with a few undocumented 'secret' settings. Equipped with these settings, you're able to accomplish all they can and more, but the wizards are not going to tell you how easy it really is.

The only truly 'honest' utility in this category is TinkerTool by Marcel Bresink. Marcel is an author of several books in German on using OS X and he attacks the issue with real Cocoa code. He doesn't have to, but he does: he uses the Cocoa NSUserDefaults class.

The rest of these products wrap eminently simple command lines, only adding to the bulk and misery you have to deal with. Learning how easy it really is to do these things without the aid of further downloads or a dent in your credit card balance can be a welcome liberation.

Document Shredders

There are real document shredders out there, but at least on the OS X platform they're few and far between.

A number of so-called 'shredders' are only invoking your own command line tool 'rm' with the special '-P' switch to 'purge' files targeted for deletion: ie overwrite them a few perfunctory times before unlinking them - something that hardly constitutes 'shredding' and something you can already do without their aid - Panther's 'Secure Empty Trash'.

It's not good enough for professional use, but it may be good enough for 'home use', and in such case you hardly need more products than you already have.

To read about the distinction, pick up on the 'Secure Delete Hoax' article elsewhere on this site and be sure to get the USENIX paper on securing magnetic media.

What Can I Do About It?

Without an in-depth knowledge of the operating system it's difficult to see what's smoke and mirrors and what is real computing.

Sometimes you can pluck apart application packages, and on occasion you'll find AppleScript modules within - in such case you can load them into the AppleScript editor and see if they pull the old 'do shell script' trick to invoke Unix command line tools you already have.

You can drop the executable on Xstrings and see how many times you encounter the string 'defaults' or other common Unix commands.

A well engineered program will be small: Cocoa with Objective-C is quite reasonable in its use of disk footprint; other methods consume far more space and bring your download up in the megabyte range or beyond.

Unless other factors play a part, the size of your download is inversely proportional to its quality and merit.