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I’m a card carrying Mac tinkerholic. I tinker, I dink, I tweak, I check. One of the utilities that I use to tinker on my Mac, one of many, is OnyX. It’s free.

Onyx Does What?
Basically, OnyX is one of a dozen or so utilities for Mac OS X that give you hidden access to secret features on your Mac. From the developer:

Use Onx to run miscellaneous tasks of system maintenance, to configure some hidden parameters of the Finder, Dock, Dashboard, Exposé, Safari, Login window and of some of Apple’s own applications, to delete caches, to remove a certain number of files and folders that may become cumbersome and more.

In other words, there’s a lot of very cool things you can do on a Mac that Apple doesn’t tell you about. Onyx is a utility that gives you access to some of those secret, hidden features.

Get Started
I love applications and utilities that give you a big list of features and then a couple of caveats. The first warning is ‘Backup Your Data’. That’s always good advice.

The second?

OnyX cannot destroy the System. If your computer freezes during the verification of the volume, it is a completely normal behavior! Once OnyX is finished checking, control will be returned to you.

Getting started is easy. OnyX comes with a Package installer. Double click, follow the instructions, and OnyX installs itself (click on an image for a close up view).

The Toolbar
Once opened, OnyX is rather self explanatory and arcane at the same time. The OnyX Toolbar is where you start. Verify your Mac’s hard drives, perform maintenance, clean caches, and more.