Startup Item Help

One of the simple steps in Bad App Alert was to add the startup item and what made this simple was using a free app. After following the app’s recommendation to update, it is no longer free to add or otherwise manage startup items. That’s ok, I’m sure there is another free utility out there makes this overcomplicated task simple.

Nope.

I tried the two most common apps and they both require a license to do such a simple task. After searching a long time for any simple utility, I finally stumbled across Launched. While it doesn’t handle everything for you, it is a simple website that asks for the pertinent info (what to run and when to run it) and does the difficult part: generates the plist file that you add to ~/Library/LaunchAgents. Just add the file to that directory/folder and it will load the next time you sign in.

It also gives you the Terminal command to load it immediately (launchctl load) and some other useful options.

One item it does not address is the additional parameters for logging output and errors. Here is a sample snippet from the previous plist file that you can add manually:

<key>StandardErrorPath</key>
<string>/tmp/cpu_watch.err</string>
<key>StandardOutPath</key>
<string>/tmp/cpu_watch.out</string>

If you know of any other apps that do this one simple task let me know!