This can be a useful utility for those few problems that it fixes; it will be even more useful when/if the author adds more fixes. However, for most of what Doktor Kleanor does, it doesn't tell you what commands it's going to execute. There's a general explanation in the readme file, and on the developer's web site, for what it does for problems with Safari, Mac Help, and Microsoft Word, but that's about it, and it doesn't specifically list the actual commands, which would be nice to have, since sometimes there's some disagreement among various users as to the best commands to accomplish a specific task.
I also have one little complaint about the new Terminal interface. It's OK, and cutely retro with its black screen and green lettering (though I think most users would be happier with the former GUI interface), but the first choice you're now given is to simply enter "1" if you have a problem, and "0" if you don't. I suppose this is handy for users who just want to launch the utility and see what it looks like, or who change their mind, or suddenly have something else to do, but if you enter "0", it takes Doktor Kleanor 15 seconds to respond, at which point the Doktor Kleanor Terminal window closes, but Terminal is left running. I suppose that's fine for people who want to stay in Terminal, but it would be a little confusing for people not used to using Terminal. At least there should be some feedback in Doktor Kleanor's Terminal window as to what's going to happen when you enter "0", and it should happen faster. As it is, you'd be better off just quitting from Terminal, or just closing the Doktor Kleanor window.
Doktor Kleanor
maintenance & problem solving utility
Version: 10.4
Some observations - DoktorKleanor
You can see everything that DoktorKleanor does : it's open-source. Control-clic on it, choose "Show package contents", open the Contents folder then the Resources folder. All the commands executed by DoktorKleanor are in "DoktorKleanor.command" (it's not commented, though) and the wrapper AppleScript is in Scripts/main.scpt.We choose the commands after a thorough reading of various Mac sites; we choose what seems to work best according to user comments (and can still be automated).
About the interface, the Cocoa GUI was nice, sure, but we don't have a Cocoa developer anymore, so we had to do without.
When you answer "0" to the first question, you should hear a sound playing for 2 seconds. The whole process, from typing "0" to seeing the window close, takes only 4 seconds on my Mac (G4/400, 10.4.2, 576Mo).
Thanks for the idea of quitting Terminal with DoktorKleanor, I'll see what I can do to implement it.
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Sunday, September 18 2005 @ 07:38 AM PDT