I think that Apple’s Sync Services is an excellent technology and has a lot of potential. It is not quite mature, but I have high hopes for it in the future. One of the problems that has been brought up on the Sync Services developer mailing list is that there is no good way for an end user to remove data from Sync Services and unregister it if they remove a program. All developers are in the same boat and Bare Bones, developers of the popular Yojimbo that I’ve blogged about have written a FAQ about it for their product. Unfortunately this really isn’t a solution, especially for people that want to keep clean systems.
This morning, I decided to attempt to write up a solution to this issue. While my attempt doesn’t solve everything (it only unregisters items from Sync Services and doesn’t actually remove the data from Sync Services or .Mac), I’ve decided to put it out there and include the source code. The app has been lightly tested and may cause issues on your system, so only use it if you know what you’re doing. By downloading this, you take full responsibility for using it and if it nukes your data, I’m sorry, but there is nothing I can do. Having said that, make sure you have a backup first and good luck. This app uses undocumented Apple calls and is likely to break sometime in the future.
You can download my creation here. It’s quite small, so don’t be surprised if it downloads almost instantly.
The application and source code are free to use and modify. While I’d appreciate some feedback on if it helps, there is no requirement to do so.