Archive for March, 2022

App Tamer 2.7.1 fixes compatibility issues and bugs

Thursday, March 31st, 2022

Version 2.7.1 of App Tamer is now available, addressing a number of issues and also providing localized online help for French-speaking users.

Compatibility has been improved with Bartender and Steam, and a number of user interface problems and window placement issues have been fixed. User interface glitches on older versions of macOS have also been eliminated.

There’s been a lot of interest in App Tamer’s new capability of running apps on the efficiency cores of M1 Macs, including requests to do so even when the app is frontmost. You can do that by holding down the Option key while clicking on an app in App Tamer’s process list – an extra “Also slow this app when it’s in front” checkbox will appear. Just turn on that checkbox (now that version 2.7.1 properly enables it).

Full release notes and download links are on the App Tamer release page.

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App Tamer 2.7 is now officially available!

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2022

Version 2.7 of App Tamer is out of beta testing and available for download. Details and download links are on the App Tamer release page.

In case you missed the beta versions and accompanying blog posts, the marquee feature of this release is the ability to run an app on the M1’s efficiency cores instead of on the more power-hungry performance cores when you’re not actively using it. As with the rest of App Tamer’s capabilities, it’s a simple matter of selecting the running app and clicking on a checkbox:

App Tamer 2.7 also augments its interface with additional performance information to let you manage CPU and power consumption intelligently. In addition to showing overall CPU usage, it breaks it down by processor core type, giving separate stats for the M1 performance and efficiency cores. They’re included textually and graphically in App Tamer’s window, and also (optionally) as tiny ‘P’ and ‘E’ values in its menu bar display:

Conserving battery and limiting CPU usage is really as simple as clicking that checkbox, but there’s a lot going on under the hood. This blog post discusses how things operate in more detail.

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