Free Disk Utility Does Nothing But Cool.

I’m a sucker for eye candy, particularly if it’s free. What’s on your hard drive? How much junk is in that folder?

Disk Inventory X has an answer. It’s an answer that’s searching for a question, of course. That’s what Mac eye candy does.

In the case of Disk Inventory, what you see is exactly what you get. Mostly. So far as I can tell.

This is one of those nifty little Mac applications that’s a total solution where there’s no problem.

But it’s cool and works anyway. How’s that for implied logic?

Disk Inventory is simple. Download, double-click to launch, select a hard drive, or a folder on your Mac, and click.

What you get is a visual representation of all the files on your Mac’s hard drive or from within a folder.

Visual? Yes. The files and/or folders are graphically represented with different colors.

In the left column there’s a list of the files and folders. In the right is a bunch of blocks that look like a bad Tetris game.

Click on a file or folder in the list, and the graphic block in the right column is highlighted.

Conversely, click on a graphic block, and the file or folder is highlighted in the left column.

That’s it folks. You were expecting more when the price is a mere… uh, um… nothing?

In Panther and Tiger, Disk Inventory shows a display of files and folders using a visual technology called treemaps.

There’s even a one minute QuickTime instructional movie to show you how Disk Inventory works and what it looks like.

It’s about 30-seconds longer than you need to figure it out yourself, sans the eye candy in the video, and exactly 60-seconds longer than necessary to describe the value.

Since Disk Inventory doesn’t really do anything important, it’s a credit to the developers that they have a support forum with dozens of topics and hundreds of posts.

That’s scary.

But no matter. Disk Inventory is cool eye candy and can give you a visual view of files and folders all over your Mac.

Is that useful?

I found out that my Mac’s Movies folder has a collection of old Apple 1984 Macintosh TV commercials that are huge-- over 480 megabytes. I saved a gig or two just by deleting files I didn’t need.

Also nice is the list of file types within a folder or volume.

For example, Disk Inventory visually displays the number and size of MP3s vs. QuickTime files, vs. Word documents, vs. TIFF files and so on.

Handy? Hmmmm. Let me get back to you on that.

Cool looking? Uh, well, yeah, actually.

Why? I don’t have a clue (something Tera promises to send me but never has).

This is one of the many, many Mac applications that reside on my Mac and don’t do much at all, though they do it very, very well.

Did I mention that Disk Inventory X is free?

What about you? Do you have a favorite Mac utility that doesn’t really do much but it’s cool anyway?

Check out the daily list of our 9 Word mini-Reviews at NoodleMac, and Kate's daily in-depth Mac software reviews at PixoBebo.