CleanGenius Free 2.0

These days, it takes an awful lot to use up all the free space on your Mac, but it’s still possible. If you regularly load up with apps, video, music and other large files, all that hard drive space can so disappear, leaving you with little room to play with, and a major clean-up operation to perform.

CleanGenius Free - the new name for MacCleaning Free - aims to simplify certain aspects of keeping your Mac’s hard drive lean and mean. Once installed, it’ll sit in the menu bar displaying a bar chart indicating the amount of space taken up on all your attached hard drives. Click this and a more detailed breakdown of your drives is displayed, along with three options.

The first, Fast Clean will quickly clean out selected areas of your drive – as configured by selecting Preferences – to free up drive space. By default Fast Clean empties your system caches, user caches, system logs and user logs, with two additional options – Downloads and Trash folder – selectable for additional cleaning.

You can also unmount removable media from here, simply by clicking the eject button – a message will flash up once the drive(s) have been successfully unmounted.

That was it as far as the original version was concerned, but CleanGenius is more than just a name change and version number update: it now boasts a brand new main interface where you can scan for files to delete before cleaning them, letting you pick and choose exactly what gets removed.

There’s also a major new feature – the ability to uninstall applications. This doesn’t just remove the app folder, but also searches for associated files like preferences, caches and logs. You can select multiple apps to remove in one go, but sadly, unlike standalone free uninstall apps like AppCleaner, you’re not shown exactly what gets deleted, so you’ll have to trust CleanGenius on that score.

CleanGenius will appeal to those Mac users who want to quickly clean out their system without too much hassle. More techie users should take a look at a free alternative called Onyx, which has more advanced options and additional cleaning tools, but is less simple to use.

A Pro version is available for $12.99 which allows you to change the default setting – 10 per cent – for triggering the low disk space alarm. It also allows you to eject all mounted media with a single click, and (new in version 2) reveal selected items in Finder itself.

CleanGenius Free adds a welcome uninstaller component, but still seems a little limited in its overall feature set. Definitely one that will appeal to less experienced users.