This App Tamer update fixes compatibility issues with Parallels Desktop and the developer release of Mac OS 10.7 “Lion”:
In past versions, if you used App Tamer to pause Parallels Desktop, you’d get these annoying, 3-5 second pauses in mouse and keyboard input whenever Parallels stopped. This was due to the way Parallels handled the mouse and keyboard. App Tamer now only pauses the Parallels virtual machine processes and leaves the Parallels Desktop app running – that works around the issue and still cuts nearly all of the CPU use associated with Parallels. Thanks to the excellent tech support folks at Parallels who helped us find this workaround!
In Mac OS 10.7, Safari is based on WebKit 2, which does more ‘sandboxing’ of web content. It basically puts many tasks (like Flash plugins and JavaScript scripts) in separate processes. App Tamer already handled this sort of thing adeptly, but in 10.7, downloads are also done by a separate process, and that broke App Tamer’s download checking. This new release fixes that – if Safari is downloading something, App Tamer won’t stop it in the background even if AutoStop is turned on.
And finally, there are some new features and tweaks in version 1.0.5, as well. The list of stopped processes at the top of the App Tamer window gets a new contextual menu. This lets you easily turn AutoStop off for the selected process, or quit, force quit, or relaunch that app. Also, double-clicking an app in the list will activate it, and selecting it in the list will show it in the Details drawer so you can see more information about it.
If you’re already running App Tamer, you can get the new version using its “Check for Updates” command in the App Tamer menu. Or you can hop over to http://www.stclairsoft.com/AppTamer and download it from there.
