How I can uninstall something that won’t just go away when I delete it, but also doesn’t have a built-in uninstaller; I downloaded and installed an application on my Mac and now I’m having trouble uninstalling it. What can I do?

Ok, this was a bit vague, as I’m not sure what the application was; it could have been the latest arcade game or a design program helping you spec up custom car floor mats. I’m not into Macs all that much, so I had to do some digging to find out what’s going on.

What you need to understand about uninstalling is that there are essentially two types of Mac apps: bundled and unbundled. The former is easily uninstalled by dragging the app to the Trash; the latter can be deleted the same way, but can leave behind some files on your hard drive, and can be tougher to completely get rid of.

Many third-party uninstallers aren’t actually apps, but rather system preference panes; they run in the background and when you delete a program, they will prompt you to delete all files that are associated to it. These files can be hard to hunt down yourself, which is where the uninstallers come in so handy.

One uninstalled, which comes recommended, is AppTrap which automatically removes any associated preference files as soon as you drag an application to it. Check it out, it just may solve your problem.