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Archive for the ‘App Tamer’ Category
Friday, March 22nd, 2019
Some users of App Tamer have noticed that version 2.4.3 unexpectedly disappeared from their menu bar. There was a library shared across all of St. Clair Software’s apps that didn’t work correctly in App Tamer, causing it to crash when it received certain system notifications. That’s now been fixed.
Equally important, App Tamer was using more CPU than it had to, which isn’t really what you want in an app that’s supposed to be saving CPU cycles. It primarily affected Google Chrome users, but was actually a problem with all web browsers. App Tamer periodically “rebalances” the CPU usage of browsers’ helper processes, and was actually re-checking to see if the browser was downloading anything every time it did that rebalancing. That was completely unnecessary, and the download check is one of the more CPU-intensive things that App Tamer does, so it really shouldn’t have been doing that more than it absolutely had to.
So, those two issues are fixed – my apologies for the problems. You can grab version 2.4.4 from the App Tamer Release Page.
Tags:App Tamer, bug fix, cpu usage
Posted in App Tamer, Mojave | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 6th, 2019
Version 2.4.3 of App Tamer is available, offering a new option to turn off its AutoStop feature when you’ve been away from your Mac for a specified period of time.
This allows you to stop or slow down background processes so they don’t impact your work, but let them run at full speed when you’re not otherwise using your Mac.
This release also corrects a number of issues, including several crashes that occur in exceptional circumstances and a bug that could prevent apps from returning to full speed when you click on their icons in the Dock. In addition, App Tamer’s ‘wake’ AppleScript command now supports waking up all stopped and slowed apps at once.
For full details and download links, visit the App Tamer release page.
Tags:app, battery, cpu, idle, noise, save, tamer
Posted in App Tamer, Mojave | No Comments »
Thursday, January 3rd, 2019
 Version 2.4.2 of App Tamer is available! There’s an exclamation point there because it offers a fix for an annoying problem that cropped up in Mojave, where Core Graphics Event Taps no longer deliver events to applications when they’re in the background (Radar #45934966 if you’re listening, Apple). While that may sound cryptic, the end result was that App Tamer never saw mouse scrolling events when you used a scroll wheel or gesture to scroll the contents of a background window. If the background window belonged to an app that App Tamer had slowed or stopped, that meant that the window would scroll slowly or not at all. This drove me crazy ALL THE TIME because I apparently scroll through web pages and other background windows very frequently.
Anyway, in addition to that issue, this release improves the ability to move through App Tamer’s process list using the keyboard, and lets you keep App Tamer’s window floating on top of all other windows if want to use it to diagnose a problem or keep an eye on CPU-gobbling processes. A number of little interface issues have also been addressed, and a bug fixed for App Tamer waiting too long to slow or stop background processes when they were also set to be hidden after a certain amount of time.
As usual, this update is free for users who’ve already purchased a license for App Tamer 2.x. You can head over to the App Tamer Release Page to see more details or to download the new version (or just hit “Check for Updates” in App Tamer’s utility menu if you’re already running it).
And Happy New Year!
Posted in App Tamer, Mojave | No Comments »
Monday, September 24th, 2018
App Tamer and Jettison have both been updated with support for Dark Mode in Mojave.
  Jettison 1.7 also includes a number of features and fixes for all versions of macOS (well, from 10.8 to 10.14, anyway — that’s what Jettison supports). These include the addition of a menu command to mount all unmounted disks, options to not automatically remount specific drives after they’ve been ejected, and the fix for a bug that could cause some Macs to repeatedly cycle between sleep and wake. There are also a number of under-the-hood improvements and fixes.
Details and download links are available on the Jettison Release Page and the App Tamer Release Page — or you can just hop over to the Products Page and download them both!
Posted in App Tamer, Jettison, Mojave | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 18th, 2018
 App Tamer 2.4 is now available. It offers a new option to hide applications after they’ve been idle, and also lets you hide its CPU usage graph if you just want to see its lists of CPU-consuming processes. There are also fixes for several bugs, including one that could result in App Tamer not correctly slowing (or un-slowing) an app if you had the “Do not slow or stop apps if power is plugged in” option turned on.
As an additional note, App Tamer works with beta versions of Mojave, but it doesn’t yet support Dark Mode. However, you can switch App Tamer to its own dark appearance and that makes its main window match, at least.
A complete list of changes and a download link are on the App Tamer release page, or if you’re already running App Tamer, you can just choose “Check for Updates” from the menu in the lower right corner of its window.
Posted in App Tamer, Mojave | No Comments »
Friday, March 2nd, 2018
 Version 2.3.5 of App Tamer is available, bringing several improvements and fixes on the performance side, as well as showing you how much CPU time it has saved.
It gives a cumulative “CPU-hours saved,” where a CPU-hour is the amount of computing a single processor core can do in an hour when running at 100%. So if it says it’s saved 8.8 CPU-hours, as shown in the image on the right, that means one CPU would have been running full tilt for an additional 8.8 hours if I hadn’t been using App Tamer. Which means the fans in my MacBook Pro would have driven me crazy today without App Tamer 🙂
Other changes include fixing a memory leak that would cause App Tamer to gradually use more and more RAM if left running for long periods of time, fixing some UI glitches and improving VoiceOver support.
Grab a copy of App Tamer 2.3.5 from the App Tamer Release page, or by selecting “Check for Updates” from its menu if you’re already running it.
Posted in App Tamer, High Sierra | No Comments »
Wednesday, January 10th, 2018
 Version 2.3.4 of App Tamer is now available, adding an extra checkbox to the settings for each application. You can now have App Tamer automatically quit an app after it’s been unused for a certain amount of time – handy for those one-shot utilities like password managers, image converters, Contacts, etc that you look at quickly and then accidentally leave open.
This version also improves App Tamer’s ability to control the CPU usage of applications that employ helper processes to do some of their work. This includes web browsers, Spotlight, virus scanners and backup utilities, among other apps. While App Tamer’s management of CPU usage is always going to be approximate (because it doesn’t know the inner workings of every app), it now keeps an app’s average usage much closer to the limit you’ve specified.
Head over to the App Tamer release page to see the full list of changes and to download a copy of version 2.3.4!
Posted in App Tamer, High Sierra, Sierra | No Comments »
Friday, October 13th, 2017
App Tamer 2.3.3 is now available – it’s a free update for App Tamer 2 users, and a $7.95 upgrade for version 1.x users.
 It adds a checkbox that speeds up Time Machine backups, something that’s really helpful if you only plug in your backup drive occasionally, resulting in Time Machine needing to copy lots of data. Time Machine is normally set up with a very low I/O priority, which means that macOS puts it at the back of the queue for disk access. This keeps it from interfering with anything else on your machine, but means that it copies data very slowly. Mac Kung Fu published an article last year detailing a geeky way to speed Time Machine up, but it requires a Terminal command and only stays in force until the next time you reboot your Mac. App Tamer now offers a checkbox in the prefs to take care of this for you, and will re-apply the setting whenever it’s running.
There are some caveats about this method, however. Because it prevents macOS from throttling processes that have low I/O priority, it can potentially cause other processes that are supposed to be slowly doing disk or network I/O in the background to run faster. This may not be what you want in some instances. It could cause those processes to consume more battery power, for instance, than they would otherwise – so keep an eye out if you turn this option on. We haven’t seen any negative effects from the Time Machine acceleration, but there may be instances where it burns your laptop battery faster.
 App Tamer 2.3.3 also lets you change the priority of processes – the equivalent of the unix renice command. It’s not nearly as effective of a way to control CPU usage as App Tamer’s methods, but can be useful in some circumstances. Hold down the Option key while clicking on a process in App Tamer in order to get a Priority slider alongside App Tamer’s normal slow/stop options.
Posted in App Tamer, High Sierra | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, April 5th, 2017
 With today’s release of App Tamer 2.3.2, you can now resize App Tamer’s window to display more processes on larger monitors. This version also fixes a couple of nagging bugs that could cause App Tamer to think it was slowing down a background process when it actually wasn’t. If you’ve ever looked at the process list and seen a background daemon pegged at 100% even though App Tamer shows its yellow “slowed down” icon next to it, this release will fix that 🙂
The 2.3.2 update is free for licensed users of App Tamer 2.x. You can see the detailed release notes and download it on the App Tamer release page.
Posted in App Tamer, Sierra | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 1st, 2017
 Version 2.3.1 of App Tamer fixes several bugs in our CPU- and battery-saving application, as well as more smoothly supporting Spotify. If you’ve got App Tamer set up to manage Spotify’s CPU usage, it will not slow it down or stop it while Spotify is playing music. This prevents your music from stuttering or going completely silent – generally a good thing 🙂
You can find more details and download links on the App Tamer Release page. We recommend that all App Tamer users update even if you don’t use Spotify because the bug fixes are important.
And on the topic of App Tamer, I was remiss in my duties – I didn’t blog about the release of version 2.3, even though it delivered a couple of very significant changes. The most obvious one is a user interface overhaul that brings App Tamer up to snuff with the flat, white look that’s all the rage (check it out over on the right there). The preferences have also been split among multiple tabs to better organize them, and hopefully make all the settings a little less intimidating.
A more interesting, though much less visible addition is App Tamer’s new “CPU hog detection” feature. In the “Detection” tab of the preferences, you can set a limit to how much CPU any application should use. If any app uses that much CPU for longer than a time you specify, App Tamer will pop up a warning to let you know that something’s amiss, and will give you several options. If you’re on a laptop, this is great because it lets you know before the CPU hogging app drains your battery down to nothing and you realize that you left your power adapter under the couch at home.
And of course there are a whole bunch of little fixes and improvements rolled into versions 2.3 and 2.3.1 as well. It’s worth the trouble to download, especially if you’ve already bought a license for App Tamer 2 because these updates are free.
Posted in App Tamer, Sierra | No Comments »
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