Equivalent to "Add/Remove Programs" aka "Programs and Features" Controls???

Question

WHEN will Apple finally get around to adding an equivalent thing to Windows' "Add/Remove Programs" (XP) aka "Programs and Features" (Vista) Control Panel???
I am looking to uninstall some software from my computer. But only God knows where the installer has stashed files all over my drive! I don't want to leave behind a single preferences file or extension.
Is there some easy way in Mac to do this? In Windows you just go to "Add/Remove Program" and you can uninstall every last shred or trace of that software. But in the Mac... there's about four or five major places to look, but how can you know if it installed something in a hidden directory in the Unix directories somewhere??

Answer 1

drdocument, I respectfully, completely disagree with you.
The average Mac user has no clue as to what the Library folder is for. Nor would they be able to sort through it all to find the five locations where the tons of crap might be stored.
Lets take several examples. Here's some programs that I have installed that are quite typical of Mac users:
Garage Band
iTunes
Adobe CS3
Microsoft Office
NONE of these programs can be deleted easily. Garbage Band stores its garbage in numerous unintuitive places:
/Users/me/Music/Garageband
/Library/Audio/Plug-ins
/Library/Application Support/Garage Band/
/Users/me/Library/Preferences/
Further, it's not always clear whether the files you are deleting are used by just one application, or multiple applications from that same company (or even other companies). I often feel unsure if I'm deleting something from /Library/Audio/Plug-ins or /Library/Application Support/Adobe because... is it used only by Photoshop? What if I just wanted to uninstall InDesign and I no longer have the original install disk because, lets say, I sold it?
It should not fall upon the user to play sleuth and hunt down the myriad places that these apps store things on the drive!!!
There should be an EASY Control Panel in System Preferences that lets you uninstall any program off your drive. I seriously don't think that this would hamper application development or make the system run slower or be kludgy. Besides, when has Apple ever taken the path of making things harder on users because they were afraid by making it easier, it would slow down the computer???
If anything the opposite has always been true.
Even a shareware app that just has one application file and no other files on the drive should be able to be uninstalled with confidence by a control panel. Since, how do you KNOW it didn't put another file somewhere, even a preferences file? God only knows how many preferences files are on my drive that I don't need because they never got erased when I uninstalled the app. It would take me days to comb through that mess, especially since the arcane and unintuitive preference file naming scheme used by OS X does not use plain english but rather uses ridiculous un-Mac-like names like "com.unsanity.hoseyoursystem.preference"... whatever happened to "Microsoft Word Preferences" and "Adobe Photoshop Preferences" -- nice Mac-like filenames?!?!??!
I'm tired of the PC-ization of the Mac, the further and further making it more complicated, having apps store more crap in more different places. Having multiple Library folders is just a nightmare from an ease-of-use standpoint, though I know it's necessary for a multi-user OS. But there ought to be a way to have a "single-user" mode that would eliminate the Users directory all together and just store everything at the root level of the HD, rather than having all my documents buried 10 levels deep into the drive.
Anyway the point is you are wrong. The way it is set up makes it harder on users -- even seasoned users like me -- when we want to cleanly uninstall an application with confidence. It means tons of extra time sifting through the labrynthine unix crap. I hate it! Where has "user friendly" gone??
Besides I would never trust a third-party shareware program to uninstall things. How would i know that it knew what to do? Plus it adds extra expense to the OS, for a feature that has been standard on Windows for what seems like 10 years!
When will we finally get this feature? 2020?