The OmniFocus Project: A Bit of a Surprise

How good are the app uninstallers?

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You're bound to find rather egregious reviews of these app uninstallers from time to time. Especially precious are the claims one or another app doesn't find everything it should.

How can they know?

The fact of the matter is they can't.

Here's the bit of surprise: OmniFocus wasn't chosen at random. It was chosen specifically because it strews files (and modifies files) that these app uninstallers, as it turns out, could never hope to find.

So here's what really happened when OmniFocus ran.

1. ~/Documents/OmniFocus Backups. There it was, right under their noses, and none of them even saw it. Five files for now - for simply opening and closing an application. Certainly more (and more bulk) in the days ahead.

2. ~/Library/Application Support/OmniFocus. All the uninstallers picked this up.

3. ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.nsservicescache.plist. This is very important because OmniFocus puts an entry in here that will appear on your services menu. If you want to uninstall OmniFocus, then you want to get rid of the OmniFocus entry in this file so you don't screw up your system. None of the app uninstallers had a clue about this file.

4. ~/Library/Caches/com.omnigroup.OmniFocus. One of two stores in ~/Library/Caches. Some of the uninstallers find this one but only one of them (AppDelete) finds the other.

5. ~/Library/Caches/Metadata/com.omnigroup.OmniFocus. Note that this repository is completely separate from the others and that only one of the app uninstallers found it.

6. ~/Library/Caches/OmniSoftwareUpdateCheck. Unbelievably enough, none of the uninstallers found this either.

7. ~/Library/Preferences. But unlike what the uninstallers thought, there are actually three files here, not two.

8. ~/Library/Preferences/pbs.plist. This is the property list for the services menu. The app uninstallers didn't have a chance of finding it.

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