App Tamer 2.0 is finally available, and the changes are pretty exciting. The user interface is faster and easier to use, both for checking on the performance of your Mac and for managing applications that are sucking up too much CPU time.

And even more importantly, App Tamer can now slow down applications as well as stop them, so you can use it to reduce the CPU usage of some annoying applications even though those apps still need to  work while they’re in the background. Think Spotlight, Mail, Time Machine – things that seem to randomly spike the processor usage on your computer, slowing down what you’re doing or making the fans suddenly roar like a Boeing 747. Tell App Tamer not to let Spotlight take more than 25% of your processor time and those CPU spikes magically go away!

If your Mac’s fans are driving you crazy or your battery life is suffering at the hands of some self-important app that thinks it needs to hog the processor, grab App Tamer 2.0 and let it take care of it.

Get it here: App Tamer 2.0

It started as a request from a user who wanted a color App Tamer icon so he could pick it out more easily amongst all the icons in his menubar. But being an obsessive developer, I wondered if I couldn’t make that colored icon more useful too. Just last month, Adam Engst wrote an article in TidBITS detailing how iCloud had chewed up the battery in his MacBook Air before he could catch it. It was using 100% of one CPU trying to sync his bookmarks even though WiFi was turned off. If he’d known that the CPU usage was through the roof when it happened, he could have stopped it and had enough battery for his whole plane flight. Instead, he had to read the in-flight magazine and gaze out the window instead of finishing the book he was writing.

So what if I could blend those two purposes? I tweaked App Tamer to colorize its icon based on CPU usage, like this (I can’t believe I just uploaded an animated gif for this – talk about retro…):

It’s subtle for low CPU values – you might want to take note of it, but it’s no crisis you need to be alerted about. But as CPU load increases, it gets brighter until it really gets your attention at 100%. If there’s something that’s sucking down all of your processing power, you want to know.

It’s a fairly minor feature, but I now appreciate it being right there all the time. I hate having to plug in my MacBook Pro in the coffee shop just because something decided it had to do a bunch of useless work in the background while I was answering emails! So grab a copy of App Tamer 1.2 and check it out – I’m pretty pleased with it. Be aware that if it’s not your thing, you can easily turn it off with a trip to your App Tamer preferences.

Oh, and also new in version 1.2 is support for Firefox 11 and a fix for some troubles App Tamer was having when the system didn’t notify it about an application launching or quitting.

Details and download links are on the What’s New in App Tamer page.

App Tamer is being bundled with 9 other great applications in the MacLegion Spring Bundle!  Not only do you get App Tamer’s great performance enhancements, you get some exceptional (and expensive) applications for only $49.99.  That includes Billings Pro, Kinemac, MoneyWell, Hydra Pro, Circus Ponies Notebook, GarageSale, Home Inventory, My Living Desktop and WhatSize.  If you use even one of these apps it makes sense to buy the bundle.

Head over to http://maclegion.com/ and check out the deal.  They’ve got descriptions of all the applications, and a link to download them all at once so you can give them a try.

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.

There were two issues with version 1.0.3 that we missed in testing – both of them happen only in fairly uncommon circumstances, but are serious enough that they merit a new release to fix them.

App Tamer 1.0.4 addresses two problems:

1. When running under high CPU load, App Tamer’s real-time CPU usage graphs could stop updating. This is fairly uncommon, but is bound to impact many people at some point in time.
2. Version 1.0.3 wouldn’t accept certain license codes.  If this impacted you, you’ve already experienced it after upgrading. To our knowledge, it happened very rarely, but the bug has now been fixed and should no longer frustrate people.

You can download a copy of App Tamer 1.0.4 using this link.

We’ve made a number of improvements to App Tamer – thanks to everyone that made suggestions and helped test them! It’s all now ready for public consumption as version 1.0.3.

Popular changes are the addition of an auto-hide option that hides all stopped applications, and display of the % cpu saved by each application in the “stopped applications” list. There are also a bunch of compatibility fixes and little UI improvements. Check out the App Tamer release page for all the details.