14 DAY TRIAL // I've seen a lot of OS X tweakers over the years. Each of them has a little something that the others don't and the best of them have nearly everything that you could possibly wish for, but none of them come close to Mac Pilot. This tweaker blew me away with the sheer amount of useful features and options it had. It goes far beyond OS X tweaking and becomes insanely useful for anyone that likes to stay on top of his or her machine.
Tweak, tweak? In terms of the OS X Finder and Dock, Mac Pilot offers all of the standard options that cannot be configured normally such as whether to show icons on the desktop, where to place the dock and how animations behave, if enabled at all.
But it takes things one step further, offering a lot of options that are great for people who want to administer the computer easily. You can disable the emptying of the Trash, the burning of CDs, and cripple the Go menu, to ensure that the people who will use the computer cannot do the things you don't want them to.
You can also go into the heavy system stuff, completely customizing the login window, adding a 'Welcome Text' and changing the way the computer starts up from Normal to Verbose, Safe or Single User mode. For the true power user, you can opt to use only one processor, limit the amount of available RAM, use the Power Button as a Programmer's button, opt to show the kernel panic alerts on screen, kiosk mode, disable console access, and even disable the startup chime.
Application control Safari and Mail can be made to dance to your tune even more than they usually do. I'm not only talking about the debug menu and the bookmarks re-importing that other applications can do, but of those really pesky settings. The numbers of items in the recent history list and the total number of items in the history, as well as the number of days items are remembered; the initial timed layout delay and the resource timed layout delay; as well as the Back/Forward cache expiry time.
Mail can be set up to make tens of logs for every action taken, as well as set to prefer the displaying of plain text messages over the HTML ones.
Network tweaking Mac Pilot lets you change the settings of your network interface to whatever you see fit. Change the TCP Listen Queue Limit, Send Buffer, Receive Buffer, Max Segments as well as the Max Socket Buffer. Change the UDP Send Buffer, Receive Buffer, Stream Receive Buffer and Stream Send Buffer. You can even toggle compliancy to the RFC1323 and RFC1644 standards.
In terms of File Sharing, you can choose whether you want to advertise the server on AppleTalk and Bonjour, whether to allow SSH tunneling, grant administrators root access, and many other options.
Maintenance Besides letting you run the daily, weekly and monthly maintenance scripts whenever you want to, Mac Pilot lets you do a host of other things easily such as rebuilding the help viewer database, verify preferences integrity, remove unused preferences, remove all .DS_Store files, recreate the OS 9 Desktop link, update the 'locate' database as well as erase the spotlight index. And this is just naming a few of the things it can do.
Information Perhaps the greatest thing Mac Pilot does is offering a host of information that you will be hard pressed to find anywhere else.
The least of this information is the logs, which can be browsed and viewed from within it. All logs can be seen stating with crash logs and ending with install and uninstall logs. The first information gem is a listing of all the ports, both TCP and UDP from 0 to 49151. For each port, it displays a keyword and a description. The it has a list of errors, with their Code number, name and description, which I something I have been pining for ever since I moved to OS X. Lastly it has a listing of keyboard commands that spans several generations of the Mac OS, including Finder ones, start-up ones as well as special commands that work only on certain Mac models.
Despite offering all this wealth of information, Mac Pilot does make one huge mistake, and that is not letting you search through all this information.
The Good Much, much more than just OS X tweaking. It gets into areas other similar computers don't even dream about and makes setting advanced options as simple as clicking a button.
The Bad Often, because of the number of things that the program can do, it can be overwhelming. The Tools, Ports and Errors sections come to mind. Also not letting you search though all that information is a bit of a mistake.
The Truth If you want to do geek stuff without actually knowing geek, then this is the program for you. Download it, try it and laugh at the mere mortals who do not enjoy the power of control Mac Pilot brings.
Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:
