Though many people say you don’t need to do any kind of maintenance on Mac OS X, I’ve gotten used to run a couple of applications every two weeks or so to keep my Mac clean and healthy. Mac OS X is a great platform, but this doesn’t mean it can’t become slower over time, especially because of caches, logs and undeleted preferences. Did you know that when you trash an application, it leaves many stuff behind it and that if you don’t use a dedicated app uninstaller (like AppZapper) that stuff will remain there for good? Imagine that stuff being a bunch of 200MB cache folders and you get the idea. This applies for caches, system logs, binaries, unused language files.

Fortunately, there are some apps that enable you to perform maintenance tasks thus deleting that unused space, and I think CleanMyMac from MacPaw (which we previously reviewed here) is the leading app, powered by a great UI and a large set of features. Today I’ll take a look at the new kid on the block, MacKeeper, which aims at keeping your Mac healthy and clean, but comes with other additional functionalities that could really make it stand out from the crowd.

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I think Youtube is one of the websites where I waste most of my internet free time. I bookmark videos (especially music videos), watch rare and unreleased live performances of the artists I like, laugh at those compilations of internet memes, which never grow old. Together with Wikipedia, Youtube is a huge time waster, and since they rolled out the HTML5 playback beta feature, it’s even less memory consuming and stable to me.

But if Wikipedia has some dedicated clients (for iPhone, just check out Articles), the same doesn’t apply for Youtube: it’s quite difficult to come up with original ideas for a Youtube specific application other than allowing the users to download videos and let them browse videos as thumbnails in a grid.

Cathodique is an app I stumbled upon two days ago, it’s new, and it’s got some nice features that made me keep it in my Applications folder.

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If you followed the latest MacHeist nanoBundle 2 happenings, you should know that Loren Brichter (atebits) teamed up with the MacHeist team to a) include Tweetie for Mac in the bundle and b) offer the possibility to enter the beta of Tweetie 2 as soon as it will be out. This thing alone made the MacHeist double their sales in two days. As you can guess, Tweetie 2 for Mac is one of the most anticipated apps of 2010, and the user base is literally going crazy to put their hands on Loren’s newest creation. But on the other hand, there are many users who got tired of waiting months and months to have a Twitter client which supported - say - native retweets and lists, so they changed their default application from Tweetie to another one. And in most cases, the “another one” is Echofon for Mac.

I never tried Echofon before, but I decided to give it a spin after all this talking about the Mac version being good, stable and faster than Tweetie. Let’s see what the kid’s got.

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We’ve done our fair share of window management applications here at MacStories. SizeUp, Mercury Mover, and Zooom/2 have all entered the market in hopes of improving how you interact with your Mac’s windows. And they’re all equally interesting, because they incorporate similar shortcuts while going about resizing and moving in completely different ways.

Today’s application, WindowFlow, adds a new element to the mix that could replace the infamous ⌘-Tab.

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We’ve been writing a lot about Basecamp recently, and how this 37signals product changed the way we organize our tasks and projects for MacStories. I personally use Omnifocus to keep my local database in sync with the online service through Spootnik, but there’s a variety of other tools we use, like Radar, Headquarters and now, Freshlog.

Freshlog is a Mac application that enables you to take a screenshot, comment it and upload it to Basecamp. I gave it a 3 days spin, here are my thoughts so far.

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In the past months we covered some interesting alternatives to VLC for Mac, like Movist and Mplayer OS X Extended, which sported really interesting features and playback support for almost every format out there.

Today I’d like to talk about another similar app, found on Google Code once again, which is an evolution of Mplayer OS X Extended: meet MplayerX.

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I’ve made a couple MacStories screencasts before, and while I can’t particularly say they are good, (in fact, they’re hilariously bad), they’ve all been done with Screenflow. That is, until recently. While it’s not the fault of Screenflow that’s the problem - rather me, who has not a proper Mic nor recording skill - Screenflow never felt right. I don’t know, I could never find the proper documentation I wanted, I couldn’t get the effects I wanted, and perhaps it was lazy on my part to not actually play around with it for a couple of weeks, but I could just never get into the flow. When Camtasia came along, they bombarded me with documentation, easy to follow tutorials, and ultimately, it’s become my #1 choice in screencasting software. Having used Camtasia and Screenflow together, if you know one you can use the other quite seamlessly.

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