Uninstall Manager and Cleanup

Review by Mike Featherstone

26/8/2004

 

Introduction

 

Given the number of applications that have ‘passed through’ my PDA in the last few months I was not surprised to find that the type and number of files and preferences held in its internal memory appeared to be growing at an alarming rate. Every piece of software written for PalmOS seems to leave some small part of itself behind on deletion without any means of being identified or dealt with. The discovery of Uninstall Manager and Cleanup from NorthGlide Systems, therefore, came as a great relief to me.

 

Updated since their last outing in a PDA24/7 review, these utilities help you monitor what’s going-on on your PDA, enabling you to properly maintain only those applications you require and helping you remove the remnants of everything else.

 

Uninstall Manager

 

For those unfamiliar with Uninstall Manager, its core purpose is fairly straightforward. It sits quietly on your device recording the details of every preference, setting and file created by each application you have installed. The point of doing this, of course, is to maintain a full record of all the bits and pieces of software and data associated with every application so that when you choose to delete something, all the attributes and files that have been used by it get deleted as well.

 

On the face of it, this is a good deal. While PalmOS operates on the basis of unique user IDs as a means of identifying files with their parent application, not all applications follow this convention to the letter. What this means is that over time, if left to itself, your device will collect a growing set of orphaned preferences and files taking up memory that could be more effectively used for something else. By gathering all of this data together and associating it with the parent, within its own database, Uninstall Manager ensures that you are able to maximize the available facilities of your handheld device.

 

In use, the main screen displays a list of all your current applications on one side with the details of the program and the associated preferences and files on the other, utilising the full size of a hi-res+ display and allowing good use of a 5-way navigator if available. This information effectively tells you what will be removed from your device if you uninstall the selected application.

 

The associations between preferences, files and applications can be made in a number of ways depending on the specific application and the way it works.

 

• The simplest method of association is the set of unique IDs used by the core OS as already described. Any file or preference tagged with an ID used by one of your applications is automatically recorded as associated with it. (The IDs themselves are recorded and managed by PalmSource to ensure their uniqueness is maintained and thus they are a fairly good way of ensuring that associated items are correctly grouped).

 

• Where common IDs are not used, the monitoring process described in the overview will track which application is running at the time any new file or preference is created and an application association is made based on that data.

 

• Where the system misses a file link entirely, which it does very rarely I’ve found, you can create an association manually between the desired items by grouping them together. This is a new facility in the latest release, I believe, which operates by presenting you with a list of available files from which you may select as many as you require and manually group them together. I think this approach could be particularly useful in the case where a single application comprises multiple executable .prc files (for example).

 

You can specify certain applications as being ignored by the automatic association process if you need to – a utility such as FileZ would be a good candidate for this feature as it has the potential to manipulate just about any file on your device without any of them actually having anything to do with the FileZ application itself. Specifying this as being ignored will prevent the corruption of your association database that may otherwise result.

 

As well as the association database, Uninstall Manager has one final clever trick up its sleeve. It monitors all HotSync operations and stores details of the applications and files installed at each one. When an application is deleted, this list is scanned and any additional files or applications installed at the same time are offered for deletion on the assumption that they may be related to the item you are removing. I must emphasise that they are only offered for deletion and you may decline the offer if you wish - installing multiple applications at one Hotsync is clearly a possibility. This feature is actually one that I hadn’t understood from the documentation but discovered accidentally when deleting a demo application (for review) prior to installing the full version of the software. Its suggestion of a companion file for deletion was correct and saved me the time required to find it, but more importantly it saved me the space I would have lost had I left the extra application files on my T3 following the deletion.

 

It is worth pointing out that with the registered version of the software, you do not actually need to use Uninstall Manager itself to delete your applications and all the associated data. If the 'Work in background' option is selected in the Settings window, this utility will monitor applications being removed from your handheld by the OS as well as those being installed. If a deletion is detected, Uninstall Manager will respond by giving you the opportunity to delete all of the associated files and preferences as if you had used Uninstall Manager itself to perform the operation. I must confess that I haven't tried this aspect of the software personally as I'm quite happy deleting things from within the utility but it gives a sense of reassurance that all that monitoring and linking will not be wasted if I go and delete something from elsewhere.

 

Having described the core function of uninstallation, there is one final aspect to this software worth mentioning and that is the Sandbox facility. If you wish to try a new application but are unsure of the impact it will have on your device or its configuration, the sandbox is an effective way of finding out. It effectively segregates an area of memory and installs your new application temporarily to that area. This software can then be run and tested in this isolated environment and the impact it has on your machine can be gauged. If you don’t like it, a simple tap will remove it and everything it created - the sandbox is raked clean to use an appropriate metaphor. If you do like your new application, tapping a different button will allow you to install it permanently. It's a very effective way of trying something out without risk of corrupting anything else in memory.

 

Cleanup

 

Cleanup is an application with a different but complimentary job to that of its sibling, as unless you’re very lucky, you probably won’t get to install Uninstall Manager on your brand new device before any other applications are downloaded to it. What Cleanup does, to help in this scenario, is scan through any pre-existing databases and preferences and highlight those that it does not believe are associated with an existing application. There might initially be a quite a lot of these, especially if you’ve had your device for some time and used a lot of applications but Cleanup has further functions to help you whittle this list down.

 

The chief of these is the Signature File. This is a list of files and preferences maintained by NorthGlide and updated, effectively, by the users of Uninstall Manager and Cleanup. For each item, the list details the application with which it is actually associated so that Cleanup is able to tag otherwise unidentified files and preferences with their source application details. Given this detail, it is then fairly simple to determine whether that application is one you are still using and so delete the preference as appropriate (or not!) and recover any wasted space. It’s not an infallible system, particularly where a file is used by more than one application in a developer’s suite of software, but it does fill a hole in what would otherwise be an almost impossible task.

 

Even after the Signature File has been used to identify as many of your possibly orphaned items as possible, there will still be some that remain unidentified. In my usual cavalier fashion, I took these and simply deleted them from my device and then started playing with my application suite to see what had been broken. While this is not the recommended approach, Cleanup does cater for it in that it creates a backup copy of those items deleted through the application. Thus, if you do end up in problems as a result, you can easily restore the required preference or file and end up back where you started.

 

As an example of this, one of the unidentified preferences on my device was, in fact, the registration detail for MobileDb - as I found out when I next went to run the application. While I do have a record of my registration data, it was much easier just to restore the missing preference than to open up various applications and files to recover the missing code.

 

Analysis

 

As utilities go, these are very useful – there is no doubt about it. I don’t know how much space I have saved by installing them, but the saving is significant (I wonder whether it is more space than they actually use themselves?). Cleanup pinpointed a number of unused items and the Signature File correctly identified most of them for me allowing me to delete those I no longer required. For the others, the ‘Safe Delete’ mode offered by Cleanup provided a simple method of trying to do without them without actually removing them completely. That is just the sort of safety feature that is crucial in applications of this type, in my opinion. Without it, I would still have deleted my ‘extra’ preferences; I just wouldn’t have been able to restore them so easily once I had worked which application needed them.

 

The interface to both utilities is clear and the functionality fairly well defined such that, in use, the software is fairly simple to manage. That's what this sort of application requires, of course, as no-one buys a PDA in order to run software to manage the content of their PDA! File management will always be a maintenance task and as such needs to be able to be completed as quickly and simply as possible. These applications manage to meets that requirement in my opinion.

 

I'm impressed with the behaviour of the suite when an application is installed to a card. If you’ve read the review, you’ll know I've recently had Gagarin's Mission installed on my SD card. This installation also installs a number of files in the main memory of the device. My expectation was that Cleanup would identify these as orphans and offer to ‘handle’ them for me but it didn’t, correctly identifying the data as being associated with the game even though it was installed elsewhere. Removing the card suddenly caused them to be orphaned and they were then correctly highlighted as such.

 

One slight wrinkle I’ve found relates to the beaming of applications between PDAs. When a file is received via IR (and presumable any form of communication other than HotSync), Uninstall Manager will associate it with whatever application happened to have last been running on the device at the time the file was received. I guess this is a 'best guess' assumption that that application was the creator of the new file as this is all the data that the software has to work with. It’s not a big problem but needs to be borne in mind if you are in the habit of beaming files between PDAs and plan to use Uninstall Manager.

 

I must admit to some hesitation over the potential (ab)uses of these utilities. Given that a lot of the PalmOS software market runs on the basis of timed software demo's, enabling 'try before you buy', any utility such as these that enable you to remove all traces of an application can also allow abuse of the demo system by artificially prolonging the demo period. Having said that, however, using the utilities in this way while possible, quickly becomes annoying (yes I have tried it) and longer-term quickly becomes impractical or just too much bother.

 

Conclusions

 

Negative spin aside, Uninstall Manager and Cleanup between them have done a good job of clearing up my T3 and reducing its contents to those items I really need to run the applications I have installed either for personal use or evaluation and review. I never get really excited about utilities as they will never be a core requirement for my use of a PDA but that said, these programs have surprised me and done not only what I expected of them but more besides. As such, I would recommend them highly if you are looking to tidy up some of the rubbish left behind on your PDA.