By 'Doctor Dave' Greenbaum

While your Mac may not have a secret black box that records every crash, the logs that are typically accessible via the Console app comes darn close to recording anything and everything that goes wrong in your Mac.  

The problem is being able to read it. Even advanced technicians have trouble parsing the voluminous amounts of data locked in those logs. Mere mortals rarely have a ghost of a chance understanding it. Log Leech from Creastoric Software (http://creastoric.com) bridges that gap and makes us look like heroes.

Log Leech won’t necessarily explain these logs but will help you at least find those nuggets of information locked in the haystack. Once installed the program will take all the log entries and sort them attractively by program (and associated icon) as well as by date. You can then use the icon to hone in on the specific information you want.

When problems develop with your Mac and you aren’t sure what could be the program, a look at Log Leech might help you find the answers. More than once opening Log Leech revealed the reason problems were occurring that I couldn’t easily find by looking at the console.

Console lumps all your program information together. You can’t always see what you need when you are faced with an overwhelming screen of random code.

Log Leech take the copious amounts of trivial information in the console and organizes it into an easy to use and read fashion. The Console App reminds me of DOS and the Unix world while Log Leech reminds me of a Mac.

Log Leech requires Mac OS X 10.6 or higher. It's Universal Binary, so runs natively on both PowerPC and Intel Macs. Log Leech costs US$10.

Pros: Great for reading logs and deriving information from

Cons:  Apple will buy this app and include it in the OS if they are smart

Rating: 10 out of 10