Cocktail: Super Simple Maintenance with Style

Let’s face it — Maintenance is very important. Some people don’t do it merely because they say it’s too hard. Some don’t have enough time. Well, the times have changed; there are now many maintenance apps out there. However, one of them stands out a lot to me — Maintain’s Cocktail.

The first thing you will notice about Cocktail is its super clean interface. It simply looks good. It is the first maintenance app I have seen that looks like someone took time to design. Even though it isn’t an app that you will have open more than once a week, it is still nice to see a great looking interface.

One of my favorite features in Cocktail is its Pilot. In most maintenance apps, pilot just means to do a complete system clean once. In Cocktail, though, Pilot is used to do that and to schedule more cleans. The scheduler is located in the Scheduler section of the Pilot tab. To set it up, you simply select what tasks you want it to do, what to do when it’s done, and when to do it. For some reason they include a completion sound popup, even though there are no options. And once you have set this pane up, you are good to go; Cocktail will do the rest for you.

Another great feature of Cocktail is its Network tab. In the Organization pane of that tab you can customize almost every aspect of how your computer works with networks! In the File Sharing tab you can set up how File Sharing works. Not many other maintenance apps I’ve seen have features like this. Although these are not for everyone, they are still useful to some of us.

One of my other favorite features of Cocktail is the log clearing and rotating. As a developer, you sometimes need to log a lot of things, so it is very nice that Cocktail has support for clearing old logs. But, Cocktail doesn’t just clear logs, it also can rotate them! Rotating logs is a task done to save disk space, but still keep old logs. So, if you ever want to have to refer back to an old log, this is a very helpful feature. To set up how Cocktail handles logs, go to Preferences > Logs. Here you can either have all logs cleared, rotated, both, or custom for each log. Even if you don’t use logs that often, it is still good to clear and rotate them, and Cocktail is your perfect companion for that!

The rest of Cocktail’s features are pretty basic for a maintenance app. You can customize your interface, clear caches, etc. However, Cocktail’s price is not. It costs $14.95 for a single user license. Although this is high for a maintenance app, if Cocktail is right for you, you will find it worth it.

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