Chores: It Lets Your Mac Work While You Rest.

Macs should be fun, work as we expect, and take care of us. There are chores your Mac can perform for you.

All you need is Jump Energy and Chores. That’s funny. Chores does chores on your Mac.

Some of us collect Mac utility applications because there’s plenty of things we want our Mac to do.

For example, we have maintenance applications which check or fix this or that. We have backup utilities to keep our files safe and secure.

There’s utilities that check our hard drives and report any potential disk failure. You see where I’m going, right.

I have plenty of utility apps that do this or that. Wouldn’t it be nice to have one that does plenty of chores?

It would, of course. Jump Energy’s new Chores is a good start. The only problem I’ve encountered is my long list of chores.

Chores is a great idea, and a decent start on what could and should be a decent Mac application—one that does what we want while we do nothing.

Backup Monitor
There are four major components to Chores. Backup Monitor does, well, duh—backups. 

Pick another hard drive, tag the files or folders you want backed up, Backup Monitor does the rest.

Maintenance Monitor
This is a popular component of other utilities. Chore monitors files that OS X may take care of on it’s own, but only when it’s awake, and OS X likes to work late.

If your Mac is off when it’s late, the Chores sort of cleans house and removes your cash cache.

We stress regular backups at Mac360 because of the chilling feeling you’ll get when you turn on your Mac in the morning.

You know, the Mac that has 5,000 photos, 2,000 songs, and all your important files. Turn on your Mac and nothing happens. It’s dead.

With apologies to Karl Malden, “What will you do? What will you do?”

Drive Monitor
Chores provides Drive Monitor which keeps track of your hard drive. Today’s modern drives have an internal alert status called S.M.A.R.T.

The problem with S.M.A.R.T is that it’s dumb. It will tell you if things are bad on a hard drive but only if you ask it. Chores handles the questions, then lets you know what’s going on.

Trash Monitor
Finally, there’s Chore’s Trash Monitor. Chores’ TM watches your trash and when there’s too much in the can, it will begin deleting files. So what?

Yes, so? But Chores goes a step further. What if you throw something in the trash? There’s no need to empty the trash, because Chores does that. But, what if you want that same file later on.

Too bad, so sad, the milk has spilled, right? Wrong. Trash Monitor knew you wanted that file and saves it for you (among other things).

What else does Chores need? Honestly, this is a good start. I have a healthy list of utilities that do a little of everything for me; some are free, some I paid for, some I keep just in case.

Jump Energy is the developer of Chores and has an attractive list of details and a download link.

What about you? What utilities are on your Mac that you can’t live without? If you had to list two utility applications to a switcher from Windows, what would recommend?