Version 2.5.2 of App Tamer is now available. It smooths out a few rough edges on Big Sur. It also respects the Do Not Disturb setting in Notification Center when it comes to warning you about apps using too much CPU.
Of interest to the curious: This release offers a new “Get Info” icon in the settings popup for many macOS system processes like WindowServer, trustd, iconservicesagent and bluetoothd.
Clicking the icon will show a system-supplied description of the process, which may help you understand what that process does, why it might be using a lot of CPU, and whether it’s safe to slow it down. Or it might not, since some of the descriptions themselves are pretty cryptic. Please remember that this information is supplied by the system, not by App Tamer, so I probably can’t help explain what an “SDP transaction” is 🙂
App Tamer 2.5.2 also contains a few bug fixes and some changes in terminology that make it clearer which processes are displayed in App Tamer’s process lists. Full details and download links are on the App Tamer release page.
Yes, yes – I’ve gotten your emails 🙂 For those of you testing the first developer release of macOS 11.0 Big Sur, there’s now a public beta version of Default Folder X 5.5 that’s compatible with it.
This release enables all of Default Folder X’s functionality in Big Sur, but DFX’s iconography and UI details haven’t yet been updated to match the Big Sur design language. It’ll get you up and running with the features you’ve grown to depend upon, and I’ll follow up later with new icons and UI tweaks specifically for Big Sur.
Default Folder X can automatically add buttons to the toolbar in all Finder windows so that you can quickly get to its menus or drawer. I’ve had a number of inquiries from folks that use Path Finder as a replacement for the Finder, and they want those same buttons in their Path Finder toolbars.
Unfortunately, Default Folder X can’t automate this, so you’ll need to add the buttons manually. Here’s how to do it in Path Finder 9:
Default Folder X 5.5.7 (and later) directly supports adding its buttons to the Path Finder toolbar if you’re using Path Finder 10.0.4 or higher. Just turn on the checkboxes in your Default Folder X preferences to add them to the Finder toolbars and it’ll automatically add them to Path Finder too.
Version 5.4.6 of Default Folder X is now available. For new users, it offers a Quick Start dialog that quickly shows you a few of Default Folder X’s primary features.
For those of you already familiar with Default Folder X, this release is more about bug fixes. At the top of the list is a fix for an elusive problem that could cause the “Save all attachments” dialog in Apple Mail to respond very slowly or get stuck on-screen. There are also corrections for some fairly minor, but annoying issues.
Version 2.5.1 of App Tamer is available now. Among other things, it includes fixes for a couple of complaints with the “using too much CPU” notifications that App Tamer puts up when a process is – you guessed it – using too much CPU. It will no longer notify you if you’ve already throttled an app, even if the app is still over the warning threshold. It also provides a method of making the “Let it continue” button suppress the high-CPU notifications for longer. The default is now 10 minutes (instead of 5) before you see another warning, and you can change that by using this command in Terminal:
where XXX is is the number of seconds to silence notifications.
And for those folks that want to automate control of their apps, a new “manage” verb in App Tamer’s AppleScript dictionary lets you create scripts so you can change settings on a schedule, change an app’s settings with a keyboard shortcut, or something AppleScript-y like that. Here’s an example:
That will slow Safari to 2% CPU usage when it’s in the background and will hide it after it’s been idle for 10 minutes. To see all of the options, open App Tamer’s dictionary in Script Editor.
This scripting ability is being used by some users to change settings for backups so they run with different CPU limits at night vs. during the day, and throttling background apps more aggressively during video calls. As they say, the possibilities are endless!
App Tamer 2.5.1 also includes a number of fixes for infrequently encountered bugs, such as incorrect behavior when the stats update frequency is set to “never”, and processes not appearing when they’re run from the Terminal using ‘sudo’ or ‘su’.
Version 5.4.5 of Default Folder X is now available to enhance your Open and Save dialogs even more. Default Folder X has always provided hierarchical menus that let you very quickly navigate to a folder or file you want, but sometimes those menus aren’t sorted the way you want them. To switch between sort-by-name and sort-by-date, just hold down the Option key before mousing over a menu or submenu – that can make it much faster to find what you’re looking for.
This release also addresses some performance issues if you’re using ARCHICAD or if you’re using screen-sharing while working from home. And there are bug-fixes, including a fairly common one for folks who access files on a NAS or server.
HistoryHound 2.2 is now available, giving you the option to add its icon to your menu bar so you can search your browsing history even faster.
HistoryHound still finds text in all the pages you’ve visited in any of the major Mac web browsers, but now handles Chrome and Firefox power users better. If you use multiple user profiles or run both Firefox and Firefox Developer Edition, HistoryHound will now track and search your history more efficiently and accurately.
This release also eliminates delays that could occur when you have HistoryHound set to “search as you type,” and adds a contextual menu to its error window so you can quickly add filters to keep certain pages from being added to your search index.
Version 5.4.3 of Default Folder X, our app for managing files and folders in Open and Save dialogs and the Finder, is now available. This release speeds things up when opening items in the Finder, ForkLift and Path Finder, as well as when saving files to slow servers over a network. It also brings little improvements in several areas:
The on-the-fly previews (the ones you see when traversing Default Folder X’s menus, in its Finder drawer, and in Open dialogs) have been improved to look better and display more smoothly.
It’s now easy to make Default Folder X forget all of your recently used files, folders and Finder windows all at once. Just hold down the Option key when choosing “Forget Recent <whatever>” at the bottom of a menu, and the menu command will change to “Forget All Recent Data”.
For any AppleScripters out there, there are new commands for managing files and folders in DFX’s Finder drawer, and an option to pop up its menu at a specific screen location. Note that if you’re using a macro utility that can run AppleScripts (like Peter Lewis’ excellent Keyboard Maestro), this can make it really handy to get to Default Folder X’s menus without going up to the menu bar.
There are also more than a dozen bug fixes, covering everything from occasional reliability issues to more esoteric problems with Pro Tools, Rogue Amoeba’s Fission app, and the built in screen capture utility in Mojave and Catalina. Oh, and Default Folder X’s Finder-click feature will now recognize all the tabs in Finder windows that aren’t in the current Space (if you’re using Mission Control to manage multiple workspaces). That was a really weird one.
Itemized release notes with all the details are available on the Default Folder X Release page, as usual, along with download links.
Version 2.5 of App Tamer is available, addressing a number of issues with different web browsers.
It adds default settings for Microsoft Edge, throttling Edge to 2% CPU when it’s not in the foreground.
It also fixes issues with Chrome apps that run as separate processes (created by saving a Chrome Shortcut with the “Open as window” checkbox turned on), making sure that Chrome is left running at full-speed when a shortcut app needs to run unhindered.
Performance problems have been resolved when site-specific browsers created with Epichrome are running. Previously, their reliance on frequent, repeated calls to shell commands was causing App Tamer itself to use too much CPU.
And finally, site-specific browsers created with Coherence Pro can each have their own settings in App Tamer, rather than all being managed with the settings you’ve given to Chrome.
Full release notes and download links are available on the App Tamer release page, or by choosing “Check for Updates” in App Tamer if you’re already running it.
HistoryHound 2.1.1 is available, adding support for Microsoft’s Edge browser to our multi-browser search utility. It also improves the way HistoryHound creates its search index, resulting in faster updates and yielding more accurate results. As usual, a number of bugs were also fixed to make HistoryHound more stable and reliable.
For a list of changes and links to download the latest release, go to the HistoryHound release page.
