Dazzle

Dazzle now seems to have disappeared and become MacCleanse 5 from koingosw.com.

<font><font>dopo un approfondito utilizzo di dazzle su mavericks ho dovuto reinstallare molte applicazioni.
dazzle è un'app pessima e pericolosa</font></font>

mi sembra una buona applicazione. la sto confrontando con cleanmymac, maccleanse e macboost. per ora posso solo dire che ho dovuto reinstallare total finder. vedremo

Overall, this app is very promising but I was probably naive to put so much trust in its first release. I happened to be looking at my dwindling disk space when the offer for Dazzle arrived in my inbox. The interface seemed very professional and I started using the features and watching the disk space increase. Then big problems; I think maybe due to the binaries feature? For whatever reason, many of my applications stopped working. They just would not open. Deleting preference files didn't help. I got a few applications working by downloading and reinstalling (e.g. 1Password) .... after using Dazzle to uninstall! Another app was successfully fixed by copying from a back up (Keynote). But lots of the native apps were also wrecked - e.g. Preview, Stickies, and App Store (made it hard to reinstall other apps). MacOS would not let me overwrite them so I've resorted to a full system restore and that seems to have me back in action. The developer's website states the interface is completely intuitive and therefore no instructions are necessary! I agree the interface is good but I would like some clarification. What do the red and green colours in the "Cleanup" screen signify? And in the Duplicates section, are the ticked items destined to be deleted or are they ticked to indicate they will be kept? Kind of important to be certain but without any instructions .....

I have tried many similar software programs and used Macleanse until their latest version. I believe ver.4. It had so many bugs I lost all confidence in safely using it. I finally bought CleanMyMac 2 and have been very satisfied. Today, I decided to try Dazzle and found Dazzle found many files such as language files over looked by CleanMy Mac 2. In just a short time it became apparent Dazzle was searching with greater depth and accuracy. I have decided to purchase Dazzle. Though gun shy from my experience with MacCleanse, my impression is Dazzle is safe and seems to do a great job finding binaries, language files and other items not found by CleanMyMac 2. Dazzle is not as fast as CleanMyMac 2 and at least for now my plan is to keep both and actively use and continue to compare. As a first release, however, compared to a program now on version 2 one must realize Dazzle has done a great job out of the gate. I look forward to really good things from Dazzle and appreciate what they have done so far.

As a CleanMyMac user, I thought I would take a look at this as both sport very similar features, and as someone who regularly tries out and uninstalls a lot of software, I was particularly interested in the 'leftovers' feature, and was interested to see if Dazzle would find stuff that CleanMyMac had missed. Unfortunately the resulting list of files that Dazzle proposed to delete as traces of 'no longer installed' apps gave me some cause for concern, not least because most of the files it wanted to remove belonged to apps that were still installed! It offered to remove parts of Photoshop Elements, iStatMenus, CleanMyMac (files belonging to the Disk Watcher and Trash Watcher processes), Hazel and various others and had I just hit the Erase button following Dazzle's recommendations, I'd have probably made a few problems for myself. Hazel in particular seemed to be an issue because Dazzle wanted me to delete all of Hazel's support folders (e.g. Logs, Application Support etc.). On top of this it suggested deleting some PDF files I'd created (no idea why) and it even wanted to delete parts of itself, like com.kallaxa.DazzleHelper.CleanupReminder.plist and MonitorTrash.plist. To be fair, it did spot one app I'd recently uninstalled that had left behind one file, although this file was also spotted by CleanMyMac when I compared its results. In fact CleanMyMac spotted files belonging to 3 other apps that had been removed recently that Dazzle had missed. Another issue was that I was using iTunes and had PathFinder open in the background. Out of the blue, Dazzle pops up a dialogue saying "Uninstalling Path Finder by dragging it to the trash will leave behind preferences, caches, logs and other items behind! Would you like to correctly uninstall this app and related files using". Firstly, I hadn't dragged PathFinder to the trash, secondly I wasn't aware that Dazzle (which wasn't running at the time) had installed a background agent by default. Given the somewhat over-zealous results above, I've been rather loathed to use any of Dazzle's other features in anger. That said, I have a quick look at most of it's other features all of which appear reasonably standard in terms of clearing up cache files, log files, extensions, etc., and for the most part its results looked similar to those of CleanMyMac although I didn't drill down into the detail. In the end, even though Dazzle is around $10 cheaper (when it's not on offer) that CleanMyMac, I wouldn't switch to Dazzle. I get the impression that as a version 1.0, Dazzle still has a few rough edges that could land an unsuspecting user in trouble. Perhaps subsequent versions will address this?