Urania

One of the most important programs that hadn’t been ported to Leopard was AppleJack. AppleJack is an awesome program written by Kristofer Widholm for system maintenance that you can run in Single User Mode. In a nutshell, it makes it easy to repair disk permissions, clean out foobared cache files, bad preference files, etc… all automatically. Its easy to install and to run it,

1. Reboot your Mac and hold down Cmd-S during the boot until the text booting dialog appears.
2. Run applejack. I enter applejack auto restart to automatically do all the system maintenance then restart into normal multi-user (graphics interface) mode.

AppleJack has saved my bacon more than once. I use it on those rare occasions where I have to do a forced shutdown of my Mac, but it has also fixed problems due to bad preferences or messed up font caches for me. I just tried out this version under Leopard on my MacBook Pro and it worked like a charm, about 5 minutes start to finish and it found a variety of permissions problems and fixed them. Best part is its free, so you have no excuse for not using it.

While the main site hasn’t been updated to reflect the presence of the new files, you can download AppleJack for Tiger or Leopard (version 1.5) here. There are also versions for Jaguar and Panther. Basically, its a must have tool for almost any MacOS version!