Mike Benner: Cocktail, a necessary 3rd Party Application?????

Cocktail, a necessary 3rd Party Application?????

Oct 30 by Michael Benner

So lately I have been noticing my hard drive space diminishing quite a bit. Initially I attributed it to Parallels and the Windows hard drives, but then it seemed to get out of control. Having made the decision to go to a smaller, faster drive my space is at a premium. After looking and optimizing I could find nothing.

Enter Cocktail,

the most needed 3rd party program for Mac OSX (10.4, it is not Leopard approved yet). You see, I had downloaded a file when I was redoing the design of this blog that was on my desktop (yeah, I know, I can be a hypocrite) and I used Eclipse to open it. When I point Eclipse to my desktop it show me 10 files that started as .QT. Each of these files was over 900MB. WTF? Hidden Quicktime files a gig and larger? How do I get rid of them and more importantly, where did they come from?

A quick search of the world's knowledge base, turned up the fact that these were temp QT files that had not been deleted. I do recall when this could happen, I was converting Windows Media Center files to my iPhone and was using my Desktop as a temp location so I could view and clean up when finished.

OK, great, they are "normal" and not a virus or anything like that, but being a new Mac user and not very familiar with Unix/Linux commands, I would have to do this visually, but how? Mac doesn't have a "View Hidden Files" and since these files start with a dot, they are automatically hidden. I can see them in certain dialog boxes but can't rename or remove them from there. More searching the internet turned up Cocktail.

Cocktail, let me see these hidden files and delete them, bring me back another 15GB on my drive. It not only allow this, but has some scripts for daily, weekly and monthly use, to keep you computer in check. It strikes me as a Mac version of TweakUI. My MacBook Pro has seen more love this week than it ever has. It got a new network card, Cocktail, Leopard on Friday and even an iSkin ProTouch and you know what, every penny has been worth it as it is running as good as the day it came out of the box.

I have not purchased Cocktail yet as I am going to Leopard on Friday and it is not compatible, but you better believe as soon as it is, they will get my money. I can't recommend this software to new (Mac, previous computer experience is a must to not break or permanently lose your data) users, and look at Apple, wondering why there is no "Super User" way of handling this.