I haven’t upgraded my MacBook to Yosemite yet, but I probably will soon. Before I do any major OS upgrade, I like to clean things up a bit. One thing that’s been on the back-burner for a while is going through the list of programs that are running in the background and seeing which can be dropped. I’m currently using Bartender to keep my menu bar under control. But even with that, it’s clear that I’ve got too much stuff running.
For a while, it seemed like every company out there, regardless of whether it made any sense or not, wanted to become a cloud storage provider, like Dropbox. So, at various times, I’ve had programs running on my Mac and/or PC to keep a local folder synced with cloud storage services from Dropbox, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and maybe a few others. Currently, I seem to be running clients for Dropbox, Amazon Cloud, and Google’s Music Manager.
For better or worse, I seem to have drifted into using Dropbox across all my devices. So that stays. And the Google music software just uploads any new music from my computer to my Google Play library, which is useful, so I’m keeping that. (And I think I should write up a blog post on that some time too.) But, after looking into where things stand with Amazon’s cloud drive, it looks like they’ve probably discontinued the Mac client software. If you look at their Cloud drive site right now, there’s no mention of the Mac client, and searching Amazon’s site didn’t turn up any place from which to download it. So I guess they’re not that interested in it anymore. And I’m not really using it, so away it goes.
I haven’t found much else that I’m willing to give up. So I don’t think there’s much else I can do to streamline my OS X install before the Yosemite upgrade. But the MacBook has been running slower than I’d like for a while now, so I’m hoping that either Yosemite speeds things up somehow, or that I can find some (relatively) painless way to speed it up on my own.