All About Applications

App Installation Methods

With the days of floppy disks and CDs for software installation long since passed, much of today’s third party software comes on a disk image and/or in a package.

A disk image is a software variant of a physical disk, designed to mimic its counterpart on screen without the hassle of moving parts or even a tangible form. It’s one of the standard media from which to install an application.

Over the years, many disk images have included software documentation. These days, they tend to contain one of two things: the application alone or a package handled by the Installer utility. Sometimes, all you have to do is drag the app to your Applications folder, and there might even be an alias to it right there in the window.

Or, you might open a package and step through several screens toward installing the app and some support files. One advantage of this approach is that after installing, the computer keeps a receipt, a small file indicating what was installed so that another utility can thoroughly uninstall the app later on.

A more modern and elegant approach to app installation is via the App Store. Like the iOS App Store, the Mac App Store makes it dead simple to install an application. Find the app you want, click Get or the price, and click Install. The app downloads and is ready to use.

Cleaning Up Applications

Make a Finder window and go to your Applications. If you’ve upgraded macOS but never cleaned up your Applications folder, you might have any number of apps that no longer work. You can tell because the app icon has a circle with a slash overlaid.

Meanwhile, you might find apps you used a while back and forgot about. Or ones that just don’t serve you anymore. Plus, there are apps that came with macOS that you just can’t delete.

It’s worth familiarizing yourself with the latter and/or identifying the other apps you’re not using so you can save some storage space by deleting them.

While you can generally just move an application to the trash to uninstall it, you might first want to install a utility like AppTrap or CleanMyMac to handle deleting the related application support files that are stored elsewhere on your Mac. [Update: As of 2023, I use AppCleaner.]

Primary Apps On Hand

You’re not alone if you think you have too many apps. I’ve fallen into that trap, too. But apart from eliminating the ones you never use, I recommend starting with cleaning up the Dock. I consistently keep in the Dock the applications I use regularly and usually have open all the time.

Here’s my current list: Mail, Messages, Slack, Calendar, Notes, 2Do, Brave Browser, Safari, Asana, Music, Reeder, Zoom, Keynote. That’s it! All the rest are in the Applications folder and I can open them at will using Spotlight, LaunchBar, etc.

Keeping this list concise ensures that I can easily see, open, or switch to the apps I use most. The only other things in my Dock are the Finder, the Trash, and my Downloads folder. For the purpose of this post, I’m showing my Dock horizontal, but I prefer to keep mine vertical on the right side of the screen to avoid getting in the way of my normal mousing habits.

The Dock is truly a separate entity from the desktop or any other window on the screen. So, to remove an item from the Dock, you simply drag it out of the Dock. Make sure you drag far enough from the Dock that macOS interprets your action as you intend. You’ll see either an X or the word Remove indicating the result of your intentional act.

Only if an application is open will it spring back into the Dock, but it will disappear when you actually quit it. Again, all your apps are in the Applications folder even if they’re not in the Dock, so you needn’t worry about losing anything.