It’s getting warmer outside and you really want to go enjoy the fresh air … with your Mac by your side. The only thing is that the hard drive of that poor machine is so packed it’s a miracle that it’s even operating at all – time to clean some stuff up! A few weeks ago we reviewed MacPaw’s CleanMyMac and we have great news for you today – the creators of that fantastic software have agreed to issue a coupon code just for you TechJaws readers! Knock off 20% from the cost of their software.

How do you get it?

1. Go to http://macpaw.com/cleanmymac/
2. Push the “Buy” button
3. At the bottom of that page you will find a Coupon Code (Optional) field
4. Enter “TECHJAWS“
5. Watch all the prices get slashed the moment you apply the TechJaws coupon!

Got friends who could use it? Spread the word, it’s only good until the end of the month (February), so don’t miss out & happy early (Mac) Spring cleaning!

We’ve all heard it – Macs “just work” and nothing ever goes wrong with them. While that can generally be somewhat true, certain things don’t get advertised. The Macs, while fancier than most regular PCs, can collect digital garbage in a way similar to every Windows-based PC out there – the more you use them, the more garbage that accumulates. So what if you lose a few gigs, you get so many, right? Not necessarily – Apple’s MacBook Air comes with a 64GB SSD – 60GB usable, about 15GB taken up by the operating system installation and suddenly the remaining 45GB of space are a whole lot more precious.

That’s where MacPaw’s CleanMyMac comes in & they have kindly provided us with a copy of their software to review. I have tried it on 2 different machines – my work Mac & the personal machine and the results, while positive, have varied. The work machine was just re-imaged so for all practical purposes I will just refer to it as the “new Mac” while my personal Mac has had a few years to accumulate useless files.

So they have a fantastic-looking website, but I am sure you are wondering if their software works as advertised and I am happy to share with you that it certainly does regardless of whether you have a brand new Mac or a somewhat aged one. On my new machine it cleared up over 2.5GB which may not seem all that exciting, but it got me excited to see how it would do on my older personal Mac & before I knew it, CleanMyMac had freed up 6.65GB of storage!

The software starts out by asking you what languages you care about so that it can strip out any content in languages that are not of any interest to you. It’s got an extensive Preferences screen allowing you to chose between cleaning:

• User Cache
• iOS Photo Cache
• System Cache (Privileged - meaning it requires you to authorize it with your computer’s admin password so that it can access these files.)
• User Logs
• System Logs (Privileged)
• Language Files
• Universal Binaries
• System Junk (that name made me smile)
• Trashes & Leftovers

It’s important to note that CleanMyMac (despite its name) isn’t limited strictly to your Mac – it will also gladly clean both Windows and MacOS temporary system files that automatically get created on every USB jump drive or external hard drive you ever plug into your machine.

For those of you who love how stylish everything on your Mac is, CleanMyMac will fit right in since it ships with a few gorgeous color themes [Marble & Titanium].

For the privacy advocates – it offers a “Secure Erase” option that physically overwrites the files you remove so that way they’re not recoverable via some 3rd party software despite having been “deleted” previously.

All in all CleanMyMac is a fantastic piece of software – could you learn how to erase each thing it erases and do it yourself manually? Sure you could, but you’d have to determine if it’s worth your time & effort to do so when something in such a nice little package accomplishes the same. Could you spend the money on a jump drive to move some of your stuff? I suppose, but then you risk experiencing Murphy’s law in action -> instead of having cleaned up stuff you don’t care about from your machine, you’d have freed up space by moving things you DO care about on a USB jump drive which won’t be with you when you need it. Instead, you could have CleanMyMac wipe the junk and let you keep your important files on your machine.

In short CleanMyMac is a fantastic application that turns clean-up from a chore to a pleasure and crushes down 10+ steps into 2 -> Hit “Scan”, give it a bit of time to do its thing & hit “Clean” … Moments later you get to enjoy the newly discovered free space on your machine. Best of all you don’t even have to take my word for it, they’ve added a nice big “Tweet Results” button in their application to let people brag about all the space they’ve regained by using CleanMyMac and you can just read what people are saying for yourself by visiting this page and reading stuff from the “Live Twitter Feed”.

A friend of mine (Nikola Ranguelov) and an author here at TechJaws, shared this screen shot with me while restoring a Mac Hard Drive. It would take 11,760 years or 103,018,533 hours to complete this task. I think by the time the restore is completed; humans would be extinct, along with the Mac.

Who said the Mac is perfect? At least a Windows machine can be done by the time the Green Bay Packers defeat the Pittsburgh Steelers in Super Bowl XLIV (45).

Photoshop not required.

Tweetie is a new OS X Twitter client from atebits (makers of the iPhone app of the same name) that’s due to be released today, Monday April 20th.

Tweetie for the Mac displays a compact window for reading tweets, replies and mentions, direct messages, and searching the entire Twitterverse. Tweets are displayed in an iChat-like interface, regardless of whether you are viewing your friends’ timeline or a reply chain. The program has support for multiple accounts and most operations, like creating a new tweet or switching between timelines, are easily accessible via keyboard shortcuts.

Tweetie offers a number of features that let you use Twitter more quickly and even more productively. For instance, the new tweet window (accessible by a customizable, universal keyboard shortcut) is separate from Tweetie’s window.

This flexibility allows you to close the main Tweetie window, removing the distractions of your friends’ tweets, while keeping the program running, so that you can continue to publish your 140-character musings. The posting window even has a drop-down menu for switching between accounts for those who post under different names.

You can read more about Tweetie from MacWorld here.

Tweetie will be released today to the public, Brichter will offer it in both a free, ad-supported version (featuring infrequent ads from fusionads.net) and a paid version for $14.95.

In 1984, Apple Computer began selling its Macintosh PC. This day marks the 25th anniversary for the Mac.

The Macintosh initially sold well, but follow-up sales were not strong. The machine’s fortunes changed with the introduction of the LaserWriter, the first PostScript laser printer to be offered at a reasonable price point, and PageMaker, an early desktop publishing package. The Mac was particularly powerful in this market due to its advanced graphics capabilities, which were already necessarily built-in to create the intuitive Macintosh GUI.

Delivering his keynote at the Macworld Expo on January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs announced that Apple Computer, Inc. would from that point on be known as Apple Inc. The event also saw the announcement of the iPhone and the Apple TV.

Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows, while still dominant with a 90.23% share, has been slowly losing ground. Apple’s (AAPL) operating systems, by contrast, have been gaining share at a fairly brisk pace 8.28% as of October 2008.

The Mac has gained popularity over the last couple of years, but it’s still far behind the PC/Windows.

Are you a Mac or PC?

Mac users can smile as Google is offering up something unique just for the Mac heads! Google has released a search box tool for Macs in hope that it will make searching outside the browser a breeze.

In a Google blog posting the company revealed that it is interested in beta testers willing to participate in taking the Google Quick Search Box from an “experimental” state to a fully formed powerful search tool.

The blog post reads:

“One of our goals at Google is to make your search experience as fluid as possible. While much of our work is focused on Google.com, we’re trying to make it just as easy to search outside your browser.”

“For the last year, we have been working on a new, open-source quick search box. Today, we are releasing our first developer preview for the Mac.”

The post was authored by Google Mac Team members Nicholas Jitkoff and Dave MacLachlan, adds the search box is still at the “experimental” stage.

This Mac version is much more experimental than its iPhone sibling, Google Mobile App, and through it you will be able to see many of the areas we are exploring: contextual search, actions, and extensibility. It is by no means feature-complete, but is a very good indication of things to come.”

“If you are interested in participating in our experiment, head over to the Google Code site and give it a try. We are eager to involve users in the development process and will be posting new builds frequently. Over the coming months we’ll be posting a few articles about the architecture and interaction we are exploring, and we look forward to your feedback.”

A Quick start guide for the Quick Search Box offers further information including current compatibility issues with Firefox and Gmail.

Google Quick Search Box requires Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

Google currently offer a Google Mobile App for iPhone, introduced in November, which lets you do a Google web search using only your voice.

Apple has changed its stance that Macs require antivirus software. Yesterday, the computer maker received a lot of negative press after an article was discovered on the company’s site encouraging Mac users to install antivirus software. Less than 24 hours later, Apple has quietly removed this recommendation from its Knowledgebase.

Is Apple projecting a false sense of security just to save face? Many experts repeatedly warn that all operating systems are susceptible to viruses, and as the Mac becomes more popular OS X will inevitably become a bigger target for malicious attacks.

Apple has repeatedly claimed that Macs, while not completely immune to viruses and spyware, are far safer than Windows computers.

Of course Macs are safer, they only own a little over 8% of the market share. Hackers would rather target the masses (Windows users) than to go after a smaller audience, but that will change over time as Macs start picking up more fans.

Surf safe all!

This is great news for Mac users who currently have an account with Netflix. Mac users can now stream movies through Netflix “Watch Instantly” feature.

This is a beta version of the new service and Netflix hopes to have the new service in full operation by the end of the year. The new service offering for Mac users comes with a selected number of movies and TV shows.

The new service uses Microsoft’s Searchlight. Silverlight is a programmable web browser plugin that enables features such as animation, vector graphics and audio-video playback that characterize rich Internet applications.

“Silverlight with Play Ready offers a powerful and secure toolkit for delivery of dynamic streaming, which offers faster start-up, and higher quality video, adapted in real time to users’ connection speeds,” said Netflix Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt. “Members who enjoy watching movies and TV episodes from the growing library of choices that can be instantly streamed at Netflix will be thrilled with this next generation improvement of access and quality, on a broader range of platforms, including Intel Macs and Firefox.”

Great news for Mac users! Netflix, the online movie rental service, has finally added support for customers who use the service’s “Watch Instantly” feature on Apple machines.

Up until now, only PC users were able to use Netflix “Watch Instantly” feature leaving Mac users in the dark. Netflix has adopted Microsoft’s Silverlight, which will allow Intel-based Apple machines to stream movies and television shows to their computers.

Initially, the Silverlight rollout will only be available for a small percentage of customers—most likely to act as a beta test of sorts. However, according to Netflix, the service will be expanded to all users by the end of the year.

Silverlight is designed to deliver media content in a Web browser across platforms regardless of browser. Netflix users who watch video on the Web can look forward to enhanced timeline navigation—fast forwarding and rewinding.

The latest generation of Silverlight uses PlayReady DRM, which allows for playback of protected content on Windows and Apple machines.

Kaspersky, via PC Magazine, has graciously told the public to worry about mobile phone worms. According to Adam O’Donnell of ZDNet he doesn’t think you should be too concerned with mobile viruses just yet.

Hush up Adam! Mobile users should at least be aware of the facts and also safe guard them selves from any threat or exploit. Cell phones are small computers with high bandwidth that can run applications, download files and play music. Any device that has the capabilities to download third party apps, is just as vulnerable to being exposed to viruses and malware.

Facts:

Cell phones have less developers than desktop computers, and consequently malware developers. That’s what Mac has been bolstering for a long time as well as the Mac user population, but we all know what happened with that. Macs like PCs are just as vulnerable to malware, viruses and hackers. What makes you think the cell phone won’t be next? Adam?

MAC has barely 8% of the market share and in the last year there have been many reported attacks directed at the MAC OS. Cell phones make up a huge consumer base and that my friend is appetizing to any malware or virus developer.

Adam you should be more careful in what you say as it may bite you in the ass.