MainMenu - a Menu Bar Enhancement to Facilitate Common Mac Maintenance Tasks

Your Mac is a pretty well-put-together piece of hardware, coupled with a nice operating system and tons of good applications. You'll still run into those times, however, when something just doesn't work the way it's supposed to. Sometimes this is because your Mac needs to be better maintained, and the problem could be anything from your system's file permissions being all messed up to something as simple as your web browser cache.

It's possible, of course, to fix all these things manually, from within applications (clean out the browser cache from inside Safari and go to Disk Utility to fix your file permissions), but there are actually quite a few operations that your Mac performs, daily, weekly, and monthly, but sometimes those "fixes" don't happen, because you might not have your Mac running when the operations are scheduled to occur.

Enter a fantastic little utility called MainMenu.

MainMenu, a free application from Santa Software, puts all those maintenance tasks right in your menu bar, where you can see them and - since you can see them and are thinking about them - actually initiate them, so you know they get done.

What all can MainMenu do for you? Well, the short answer: a whole lot.

The long answer:

Run the Daily, Weekly and Monthly Cron maintenance tasks
Repair your OSX or OS9 Permissions
Eject and/or repair any attached disks
Update your Spotlight search index for faster and better searches
Update your Locate and/or Whatis database
Rebuild your LaunchServices database
Update or Redo your Prebindings, for faster application launching
Clear your User or System Cache
Clear any and all Web Browser Cache you want to
Clear the system-wide Font Cache
Verify your Preference files and remove any corrupted ones
Force empty the Trash
Restart the Finder or Dock

And there's a whole lot more (you can get a complete list from inside the application itself and more information in general at the project's website.