A new public beta version of App Tamer 3.0 is available! The most visible change in recent builds is the ability to display the amount of RAM used by each process. To turn it on, Control-click in the stats area at the top of the window and select “Show Memory Usage”.
Note that the numbers can vary from what you see in Activity Monitor because App Tamer totals up the memory used by any sub-processes and helper apps that are employed by an app or process. It does the same with CPU usage. So the numbers you see for Safari, for example, are the sum of the memory and CPU used by Safari and all of its helper processes (Safari Networking, Safari Web Content, PluginLibraryService, etc). App Tamer will show you a list of these sub-processes if you Control-click on an app and choose “Process Details…” from the contextual menu.
But Wait, There’s More!
So what’s more exciting than that? Well, while adding the ability to collect memory information, I reexamined App Tamer’s process monitoring more generally. I revamped its CPU sampling code, making it more accurate and more efficient. And I eliminated some “slop” in the process throttling engine, allowing it to better control really CPU-hungry processes. Long story short, App Tamer is now much better at controlling CPU usage, keeping it very close to the limit you set rather than bouncing around the target value.
There are also UI improvements to make it easier to see the current temperature on the graph and a clearer indication of how processes are sorted in the process list. Organization of the options in the Stats pane of the Settings window is more logical, and a message at the bottom of the main window explains why Auto-Stop is paused when it’s inactive for some reason.
Share Your Hopes and Dreams (and Bugs)
This is a beta release, so I really want to hear from you if you’ve found a bug, or if you have suggestions or other feedback. Send an email to AppTamer@stclairsoft.com.
Download links and a full list of changes in the beta are available on the App Tamer Testing Page.
I’ve been working on App Tamer 3 for quite a while, beefing up its internals to make it more robust and more efficient, while adding requested features and improving the user interface. It’s finally ready for public testing – I’m excited to hear what you think!
App Tamer displays and controls how apps and services are using your Mac’s processors. There are hundreds of separate processes at work on your Mac – some very apparent, like Safari, and some that run in the background to support apps and the operating system.
All of these processes need processing (CPU) time to do their jobs, and macOS typically manages them fairly efficiently. However, it doesn’t always prioritize those jobs optimally. Spotlight, Time Machine, or a browser running in the background may use processing power that could be otherwise allocated to a task that’s more important to you.
App Tamer lets you take charge of processes that are consuming CPU cycles, slowing them down so they don’t impact your work as much. It can also shift processes to slower, more power-efficient processor cores, ultimately saving power (and battery runtime, if you’re using a MacBook).
And yes, if you’ve encountered a bug in macOS that inexplicably drives a service to use 100% or more of a CPU core, App Tamer can throttle that back to whatever CPU usage you decide to give it. Is photoanalysisd churning away on your Photos library to the detriment of all else? Set App Tamer to run it on the efficiency cores and give it no more that 10%.
New Features and Improvements
Here’s a quick run-down of the major changes in App Tamer. There’s lots more, but these are the highlights.
CPU Temperature
App Tamer now displays CPU temperature so you can see how CPU load is affecting temperature. This lets you make intelligent decisions about which processes need to be slowed down to keep your Mac cool and running quietly. And yes, you can automate app management based on temperature with custom rules (below).
CPU Usage Graphs with More Detail and Accuracy
App Tamer 2’s graphing of CPU usage was pretty rudimentary. Version 3 displays usage data more accurately with customizable colors, automatic scaling and properly annotated axes. It gives you more insight into what’s happening on your Mac.
Switchable Profiles
App Tamer’s ability to fine-tune priorities for apps and background processes is great, but up until now you could only set up one configuration of CPU limits, auto-hide, auto-quit, etc. Now you can create different settings profiles and switch between them. This lets you customize how apps are managed to fit different needs and workflows.
Custom Rules and Focus Filter
You can now set rules to switch between different settings profiles based on a number of criteria. Do you want to throttle CPU-hungry processes when you’re actively working in Final Cut Pro, but let them run when you’re using other apps? Slow down an app when the CPU temperature goes above 70°C? Automatically hide browsers when you’re busy writing? You can do that and more.
And if you use macOS Focus modes, App Tamer includes a focus filter that lets you switch to a particular settings profile when you enter a Focus mode.
All App Settings in One Place
You can browse and modify all customized app settings in App Tamer’s Settings window, making it much easier to review and change how you’re managing each application.
UI and Feature Improvements
I know it’s a cliché, but there are too many to mention. The UI works more smoothly, is translucent and better organized (but no, it’s not been rewritten in Swift UI – App Tamer needs to be compatible with very old systems and has to work consistently across all of them). The contextual menu in the process list offers process details plus web search if you want to know more about a process. You can throttle background processes like menu bar apps. High-CPU warnings are smarter. And a ton of other stuff.
Check out the Beta Testing Page for the long list of changes and fixes.
Under the Hood Improvements
App Tamer’s process monitoring and control engine has been revamped, making it both more efficient and more robust under high CPU loads (because you’re trying to manage your maxed-out Mac, right?). It’s also compatible with the new M5 CPU architecture in the latest Macs, and manages multi-process apps like web browsers and the Spotlight indexer more effectively.
The newest public beta version of Default Folder X 6.2 is available – you can download Default Folder X 6.2b6 here. It includes quite a few fixes for various appearance niggles that weren’t quite right in Tahoe, as well as some improvements that affect users of older versions of macOS.
First, there’s a bug fix for incorrect drag-and-drop behavior in the Quick Search window. If you dragged an item out of your Quick Search results – to move it in the Finder or to open it in a particular app – the Quick Search window would just stay on screen afterwards. It now closes as it should when you drag and drop an item out of it. This impacted all versions of macOS.
An improvement for versions of macOS from Big Sur up to and including Tahoe are the new Finder toolbar buttons.
They’re now proper toolbar buttons, and work much more smoothly than the old ones. If you’re running 6.2b6, I’d appreciate it if you turn them on in the General tab of your Default Folder X settings and give me your feedback.
There’s a full list of changes on the Default Folder X beta testing page. The overall takeaway is that this build is more polished in its support of Tahoe’s new look, while also providing bug fixes for all supported versions of macOS. If you’re already running a 6.2 beta, just choose “Check for Update” from Default Folder X’s menu in your menu bar to get the new build.
Build number 5 of the Default Folder X 6.2 public beta is available! It supports Apple’s latest macOS 26 Tahoe betas and even includes a glassy new icon created with Icon Composer 😁
The importance of this release depends on whether you’re using any of Adobe’s Creative Cloud 2025 apps. If you are, version 6.2b5 will solve problems with selecting or typing text into edit fields in Save dialogs. And although the Default Folder X betas are primarily for getting things working smoothly on Apple’s macOS 26 Tahoe beta releases, these fixes work on any supported version of macOS (10.13 High Sierra through 26 Tahoe). So yeah, if you’re running InDesign 2025, Illustrator 2025, or any other Adobe “2025” app, get Default Folder X 6.2b5.
This build also includes a second attempt to fix a rare bug that has shown up a few times in crash logs, but that I’m unable to reproduce here. The system is throwing an odd exception, but I can’t figure out how to cause it, so the included fix is my best guess at working around the issue. We’ll see if the crash logs stop trickling in 🤷🏻♂️ If you’re actually seeing a crash in Default Folder X, please get in touch!
A free update is available for Default Folder X 6, adding improvements to existing features and fixing a bunch of issues that have come to light since the release of macOS 15 Sequoia.
Feature Enhancements
Quick Search: The Quick Search keyboard shortcut can now be used to both show and hide the Quick Search window – a minor detail that’s actually very convenient. And when you perform a search, the priority of matching sequential characters is now higher than matching capital letters. This makes the ranking of search results more intuitive. Displaying your Quick Search results is also a little gentler on the CPU – it doesn’t madly try to generate all of the preview icons it needs all at once.
Reveal in File Dialogs: You can now reveal items in file dialogs by holding down the Command key while choosing an item from one of Default Folder X’s menus. This is handy, for example, when you want to open a file that’s in the same folder as one of the files in your Recent Files menu. Command-selecting that file will switch the file dialog to the folder that contains it.
Finder Labels: The Label menu in Default Folder X’s Information panel is now customized with your favorite labels as defined in your Finder settings, rather than showing the system’s 7 default colors. It will also correctly show the label assigned to files stored on iCloud, even though iCloud mucks with the Finder attributes and sets the stored label to “gray” for all files saved to or moved to iCloud.
Bug Fixes
Format Menu: Sequoia contains a redesigned Save As dialog that optionally puts the file format near the top of the dialog, just below the filename. This could confuse Default Folder X 6.1 – it would replace the format menu with its customized path menu, rather than replacing the system-supplied path menu like it’s supposed to. Version 6.1.1 no longer gets confused when that redesigned dialog shows up in TextEdit, Bean, Skim or any other app that uses it.
Sequoia Accessibility Bug: A much bigger issue has been a bug in Sequoia that causes part of the system’s Accessibility API to fail when multiple apps are using it. We’ve found that running either uBar or SideBar stops Sequoia from informing Default Folder X when UI elements are destroyed. This results in DFX’s controls in file dialogs failing to update; its Finder Windows menu and Finder-click feature show windows that are no longer there; and various processes within DFX fail unexpectedly. It basically just gets confused – sometimes really confused. Thanks to help from Oliver Tuerk, developer of Sidebar, and code from Åsmund Vikane, developer of Yabai, I’ve put together a workaround that allows Default Folder X to function correctly even when Sequoia doesn’t.
Finder Toolbar Buttons: Sequoia brought a minor change to the Finder’s preference file contents that could result in Default Folder X resetting the positions of its buttons in your Finder toolbar after you’ve manually rearranged them. Sorry about that – I know it’s annoying and maddening for you folks that take the time to make your Mac setup perfect. Anyway, Default Folder X deals with it now – and in the process I was surprised to run into Classic Mac OS style alias records in the Finder prefs. I had to break out a bunch of deprecated Carbon API calls to resolve those aliases 😳
Miscellaneous Other Stuff: There are also fixes for Default Folder X’s drawer not working correctly in certain Stage Manager configurations and a few graphical glitches.
More Info
As usual, there are release notes and download links on the What’s New page. Or if you’re running Default Folder X on your Mac already, just select “Check for Update” from its menu in your menu bar. You’ll get the release notes and a button to automatically download and install version 6.1.1. Thanks for using and continuing to support Default Folder X!
With macOS Sequoia this fall, using apps that need access to screen recording permissions will become a little bit more tedious. Apple is rolling out a change that will require you to give explicit permission on a weekly basis to these types of apps, and every time you reboot your Mac.
While I understand Apple’s desire to make it clear that you’ve given apps permission to record your screen, this seems like a nuisance. You have to click “Allow For One Week” each week for every app that’s actively capturing or streaming screen images. As 9to5Mac says, that’s going to get pretty tedious.
And if an app isn’t using Sequoia’s new “screen recording picker”, you’ll see this very technically worded warning. I’m not sure how non-technical users will respond to this:
Of course, the reason I’m grousing about this is because Default Folder X is affected. In some situations, DFX captures an image of an Open or Save dialog and displays it on top of the real file dialog as a “curtain” to hide what it’s doing while it manipulates the dialog. It doesn’t store or transmit the images – it just takes a screenshot of the file dialog, pops it up on the screen to obscure the dialog while it twiddles a menu, then throws away the screenshot.
Now Sequoia is throwing up scary weekly reminders about it recording “personal or sensitive information”. Sigh. Assuming that this new Sequoia “feature” is here to stay, I feel the only workable solution is to remove the screen captured façade and just put up a blank window to hide what Default Folder X is doing. This is … ugly. Here’s a quick illustration:
Here’s what Default Folder X is doing. Notice the menu popping up after opening “Empty Folder”:
Here’s what it currently looks like with a captured image overlayed to hide the menu activity. As intended, you don’t see anything at all:
Here’s what it looks like without screen recording, using a blank window to hide activity instead. There’s an unpleasant white flash:
I realize it’s not the end of the world – having that blank window flicker on the screen doesn’t change the functionality of Default Folder X. It’s just sloppy looking and aesthetically grating.
How you can take action
If you’d like to help out – and save yourself weekly warnings about the apps you use that capture screen images – please use Feedback Assistant to submit a bug about this to Apple. At the very least, they could add a “Don’t remind me again” checkbox to that warning alert and save us all from being pestered every week.
The bottom line
If Sequoia’s repeated reminders and dire warnings about privacy intrusion are here to stay, I don’t see any way forward except to eliminate the use of captured screen images. This reduces the quality and functionality of my software, but if the warnings are enough to put off some users, removing the dependent features is the only way to stop them from scaring people.
And just for the record, the use of captured screen images isn’t something new. Default Folder X and other applications have used this kind of trick for years to hide unpleasant side effects, clean up graphical glitches, or get information they can only get by looking at the screen. We’ve just come to a point where Apple feels it’s necessary to tell you about it on the off chance that some app is spying on you – which Default Folder X isn’t doing, but I do understand the potential danger.
The third beta build of Default Folder X 6.1 is available, adding support for the Warp terminal app and fixing several bugs that occurred in the previous beta (and in Default Folder X 6.0.8).
The other notable change is that this build won’t trigger Sequoia’s screen recording reminders nearly as often. Sequoia puts these up several times a day if an app is capturing screen images, which Default Folder X does as part of its normal functioning. Contrary to what this alert implies, DFX isn’t doing anything nefarious, just making its manipulations of Open and Save dialogs less jarring. The details are here. I’ve reduced the frequency of the reminders by abandoning Default Folder X’s automatic detection of dark / light mode in individual Open and Save dialogs, which required capturing an image from the screen.
To explain a bit: Some apps (including QuickTime Player, Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer and Rogue Amoeba Fission) let you change their appearance separately from the system-wide light / dark mode setting. There’s no generic way for another app like Default Folder X to tell which appearance they’re using other than taking a visual snapshot of one of the app’s file dialogs and checking to see whether it’s dark or light. I know that may sound stupid, but that’s the way macOS works – and honestly, for most normal, stand-alone applications this capability isn’t necessary, so I can understand why Apple doesn’t provide any sort of API to query an app’s appearance mode.
Anyway, without that information, Default Folder X may end up with the wrong light / dark mode for its toolbar around a file dialog, as well as for some of the controls within it – like this:
It doesn’t change the functionality that you get from Default Folder X, but it’s a bit jarring – and ugly. So, that’s the tradeoff – to stop Sequoia from whining at you every day, Default Folder X has to be less capable (and yes, I’ve filed a bug with Apple, but unless they get a lot of complaints I don’t think they’ll change this “feature” in Sequoia).
Default Folder X attempts to detect these situations using a different, application-specific method, and will currently do the right thing with the above-mentioned apps (QuickTime, Affinity apps and Fission). If you encounter this mismatch in other apps, let me know at DefaultFolderX@stclairsoft.com and I’ll do my best to find a way to detect the appearance for that app.
Grumble.
At any rate, a full change history and download links for Default Folder X 6.1b3 are available on the Beta Testing page.
Last week, Apple dropped the first developer preview of macOS 15 Sequoia. The current release of Default Folder X – version 6.0.7 – does not support Sequoia because, prior to last week, I didn’t have any more information about it than you did.
Now that the first build of Sequoia is out, I’ve done some testing and made a few necessary adjustments. A new Sequoia-compatible public beta of Default Folder X is available on the Default Folder X Testing page. If you’re running Sequoia, this will get you back up and running with DFX. As usual, keep an eye out for updates because pre-release macOS builds are a moving target. More changes will probably be necessary as Sequoia progresses towards completion.
Default Folder X 6.1b1 also sports some new features that I’ve added based on user requests and my own personal needs. You can now preview audio and video files right in an Open dialog, even if you’re not using Column View.
And you can save web URLs as favorites, allowing you to quickly open often-used websites from Default Folder X’s menu or by using a keyboard shortcut. Display of very long filenames and their metadata has also been improved, and a few shortcomings (bugs, to be less generous) have been fixed.
I’ve come up with a solution to an annoying issue in App Tamer. When you throttle the CPU usage of apps, their attempts to play audio can result in the sound stuttering or cutting out if they’re getting too few CPU cycles. In some cases, this can even affect the sound played by other apps.
Version 2.8 of App Tamer adds a new checkbox to an app’s settings: “Don’t stop or slow when sound is playing”. App Tamer detects when there’s audio playing and runs those apps at full speed until the audio stops. This lets you throttle a web browser to 2% CPU when it’s in the background, but if you’re playing a YouTube video and put it in the background, the video will continue playing normally instead of (possibly) slowing down and stuttering.
So far this works very well – at the expense of letting those apps use more CPU while sound is playing, of course – but I’d like to get more feedback before officially releasing it.
The biggest issue is that there seems to be a bug in Monterey, Ventura and Sonoma that prevents apps from determining whether sound is playing when playback is going through AirPods or other Bluetooth devices. I’ve worked around the problem so it correctly handles all the devices I have here, but I’d really like to have more testing done with other system configurations and devices.
Check the settings for the web browser you’re using – the “when sound is playing” checkbox should be turned on by default.
Play some audio. You’ll see a little speaker next to the app in the process list (see the image over there → ).
Make sure this works with a number of different audio output devices. Use your Mac’s speakers, your AirPods, AirPlay devices, Bluetooth speakers – whatever you’ve got.
Shoot me an email at AppTamer@stclairsoft.com and let me know what version of macOS you’re using and what works and what doesn’t. Hopefully there aren’t any reports in the latter category 🙂
Version 6.0a3 brings a host of refinements to the new Quick Search feature, including support for non-roman languages and non-English-speaking locales. Searching is also more responsive, user interaction is much smoother – it just works better all around. Please give Quick Search a try and let me know what you think!
I’ve also addressed issues with the synchronization of Default Folder X’s settings between multiple Macs over iCloud. There’s still testing to be done here – mostly in terms of detecting and diagnosing iCloud configuration problems. I’d welcome more people who have an identical (or similar) file and folder structure on two different Macs and want to have your recent and favorite items up-to-date and available on both machines.
6.0a3 also brings bug fixes and support for the beta version of ForkLift 4, and support for older versions of macOS (I’ve tested as far back as Mojave so far, but it should work fine on High Sierra too). A full list of changes is on the Default Folder X Testing page, and you can download it directly here.
