Overview

MacPilot is a typical product of the system maintenance and tweaking category. It boasts dozens of hidden tweaks (see the "small" right image for a complete list) for a diverse range of applications, as well as the standard system tweaks (Unix maintenance scripts anyone?) and some unusual features you won't find in other applications of its class.

I played with it the last few days and I have to say, it definitely is one of the better tweaking tools out there. The interface is very well laid out and makes changing system settings very easy, which invites to play around. This is both a blessing and a curse, because inexperienced user can easily set some unwanted settings.

Though the Koingo guys were smart enough to make certain, potentially dangerous settings harder to chance. For example, you can easily tweak your network settings to improve your Internet speed. But the apply button only applies these settings temporarily until next reboot. To make the settings stick — once you are happy with them — you have to press a special permanent apply button. Pretty neat.

In addition there are warning signs and explanations on all the potentially hazardous settings. Koingo did what they can to make the use of MacPilot easy and safe.

The interface

Because there are so many facets this program covers and because I don't want to talk anybody to sleep here, I decided to go the scenic route for this review. Below you will find a little picture safari that will take you through every window and tool. Just click on the images to see them in full size with a little description on it.

Fun, wasn't it?

Now, on to the good and bad. MacPilot offers all the standard tweaks and a few more I have not seen before in other applications of this type (or in general).

The general tweaks didn't offer much to me. A lot of the offered features I already knew or had applied to my system anyways. The others were of no big interest to me. I don't want to enable logging in all my applications and the Debug mode is not that useful to me.
But on the next system install they might come in handy again.

I particularly liked the three main sections Login Items, Tools and Info.

Login Items

I always tried to reorder my Startup Items in the System Preferences, because I have a few programs that take rather long at startup and I'd rather see a few others launch first (Launchbar for example), so I can jump right into working, while other things are still starting up.

Unfortunately, it does not work that easy in the Login Items of System Preferences. You can change the order, but the dragged item always jumps down to the bottom instead of where I like to drag it. MacPilot allowed me to rearrange my Login Items easily and now I don't have to go through the hassle of playing Hanoi with my Login Items anymore.

Tools

The Tools section houses a few items I found rather unusual, but very helpful. For example, Erase Unused Preference Files is one I have not seen elsewhere. It allowed me to clean up my preferences folder, which still had some unused items from 2006 in there.

A word of caution though! This tool does not warn you when you delete potentially important files. Only because an application wrote its license in the preferences folder a year ago, and then didn't modify it since, does not mean, I don't need that license anymore.

That is hardly something I expect Koingo to implement though. How would you implement a security check for every file that might exist on my system due to some obscure application?

Info

Info has a few interesting and informative popups. I have never seen a list for ports, error codes or OS X key combos anywhere except when I google for it. A nice and complementary touch. It gives the program a very polished feel.

Summary

Overall, MacPilot is a good collection of tweaks and system maintenance tools. The addition of the three mentioned sections Login Items, Tools and Info make this tool stand out for me. What I didn't like, is that there is no manual and the descriptions for individual items are sometimes lacking. But then again, I have not seen extensive descriptions in the competition programs either.

MacPilot sells for $19,95 US. If you want to give it a try, there is a 15 day trial version available. If you, on the other hand, like to get your hands on a full version of this application for free, then I ask you to leave an actually useful comment (no "Cool post!" thingies please) and I will pick a random one at the end of this week. (The license generation might take a while though, because Koingo Software is on holiday until 5th January 2009.)

Update: The license goes away to Brendan. I hope you have fun with it.

Disclaimer

I received a test license for MacPilot from Koingo Software in addition to the sponsoring of a giveaway license for this review.

Author: Alexander Kucera