It’s June, and you know what that means! Well, maybe you don’t… Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) is held at the beginning of June every year, and Apple traditionally uses the conference to introduce the next version of all of its operating systems. This year is no different, so developers world-wide (see what I did there?) are downloading and running the first early test version of macOS 13 “Ventura”.
And because Default Folder X works so closely with the operating system, it needs to be updated to support each new version. So there’s now a public pre-release build of Default Folder X 5.7 that’s available for folks who are running Ventura. For those of you who are accustomed to Default Folder X’s quick navigation and file management, this will keep you from getting frustrated while testing or developing on Ventura 😁
A download link, release notes and a list of known problems are on the Default Folder X Testing page. I’ve also rolled in a few fixes for other issues that affect both Ventura and past versions of macOS, so check the release notes for details about those, too.
Version 5.6.5 of Default Folder X is now available for download. It includes a number of improvements and bug fixes.
First, Default Folder X now recognizes files that you upload using a web browser or attach to an email as “recently used,” even if they haven’t actually been modified or opened. They’ll appear in DFX’s Recent Files menu so you can quickly get back to them.
Also, this release improves the way it handles Save As dialogs in Big Sur and Monterey. When a Save dialog is presented as a sheet, Default Folder X will emphasize the Finder windows behind it by drawing them darker as you mouse over them, but will leave the title-bar area of the sheet’s parent window unemphasized. This is done so you can still drag the window by its title bar to move it (and its attached Save dialog) around on the screen. It looks like this:
The “Downloads” window in the Finder is shown darkened behind a Save As sheet
Clear as mud, right? I’ll be the first to admit that it looks damned weird, but given that the Big Sur / Monterey implementation of sheets is a giant step backward in usability, I didn’t have a lot to work with. This method gives you the best access to your Finder windows while still allowing you to move the window (even though the new sheet UI implies that you can’t move it by graying it out).
And while we’re discussing Finder-click, version 5.6.5 fixes a problem with the way Default Folder X tracked the windows of Path Finder and ForkLift. They sometimes wouldn’t be recognized by the Finder-click feature because, in my drive to get the best performance, there was a case where I just optimized them out of existence. That’s been corrected.
Various bugs have also been fixed in the way Default Folder X handles Finder comments, cloud-synced folders, the icon of the Finder itself, and Save dialogs in macOS Sierra.
Release notes and download links are on the Default Folder X release page. Or if you’re already running Default Folder X, just choose “Check for Update” from its menu in your menu bar.
A new release of App Tamer is available for download! Version 2.7.2 incorporates a number of fixes to tighten up the layout of the text in App Tamer’s menu bar icon, and improves its compatibility with Bartender‘s multiple options for the spacing of menu bar icons. It also corrects a bug that could result in App Tamer’s helper app failing to install correctly on some Macs.
And relevant to App Tamer users using M1 Macs: Howard Oakley at The Eclectic Light Company has done his usual thorough benchmarking work and determined that the efficiency cores on Apple’s M1 processors use a shocking 70% less energy than the performance cores when doing the same amount of work (thanks Howard!). Why do we care? Because App Tamer lets you automatically run apps on those efficiency cores when they’re in the background, so can markedly reduce the amount of power used by your M1 Mac!
As usual, this update is free for anyone who already has a license for App Tamer 2.x. Details and download links are on the App Tamer Release Page.
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).
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:
Version 2.7b2, the second public beta release of App Tamer 2.7, is available on the App Tamer Beta Testing page. If you’ve recently downloaded beta 1, just choose “Check for Update” from its utility menu or in the Options tab of App Tamer’s Preferences window to get the new version.
The changes in beta 2 are relatively small, correcting interactions between the new capability of running apps on the M1 processor’s efficiency cores and several existing App Tamer options. In addition, App Tamer’s online help has been brought up to date, and a bug affecting the CPU usage graphs in beta 1 has been fixed. Details and download links are available on the beta testing page.
If you have any feedback or bugs to report on the 2.7 beta releases, please share them in the comments here or by emailing AppTamer@stclairsoft.com. Version 2.7 is on track for release soon, barring any further bug reports or changes.
There’s now a public beta version of App Tamer 2.7 available for download. The big deal in this iteration is support for the Performance and Efficiency cores (or “P and E cores” for short) in Apple’s M-series processors.
P and E core usage statistics
As you can see in the image on the left, App Tamer now displays graphs of P and E core usage as well as overall CPU usage. You’ll get these automatically if you’re running App Tamer on an M1-powered Mac.
Note that P and E stats are shown as a proportion of total CPU power available, so on an M1 Pro processor (8 P cores and 2 E cores), the E core number will max out at 20% (2 cores out of the 10 available), while the P core number will max out at 80%. This may be a little counter-intuitive at first, but it was even more confusing to represent them as a percentage of each core type. In that scenario, “CPU Used by All Apps” could show 50%, with E core usage at 100% and P core usage at 38% – which doesn’t make sense to most normal humans.
Running background apps on E cores
This is the really cool part. When you click on an app in the process list to change its settings, there’s an additional “Run this app on the CPU’s efficiency cores” checkbox, as you can see in the screenshot below.
I explained the basics of this feature in a previous post. It works like App Tamer’s other CPU-saving capabilities in that it’s applied to an app anytime that app is not frontmost. If you turn on the checkbox for Safari, any time that you leave Safari running in the background while you’re using another app, Safari will be switched to the processor’s E cores. This saves power and leaves the P cores free to handle higher priority tasks.
Note that the effects of this feature are similar to App Tamer’s existing “CPU throttling” capability, which is what you get when you turn on the “Slow down this app if it uses more than X%” checkbox. However, there are a couple of advantages:
The E cores actually consume less power by design
There’s no overhead when running an app on E cores, whereas throttling an app’s CPU usage requires App Tamer to actively manage the app’s execution
So, basically, running an app on the processor’s E cores saves more power than throttling it.
Of course, the two aren’t mutually exclusive – you can run an app on the CPU’s E cores and throttle it while it’s there if it’s still using too much processing power. App Tamer will let you turn on both checkboxes to do this.
What about Intel-powered Macs?
If you’re not using a fancy new M1 or M2 (soon?) powered Mac, you won’t get this new feature. However, that checkbox does still do something. It’s named “Run this app as a low-priority process” on Intel Macs, and it will use the macOS system scheduler to reduce the priority of the app, both in terms of CPU usage and disk and network I/O. This will reduce its impact on other apps and cut its energy usage somewhat, but not nearly as much as it does on M-series Macs.
Version 5.6.4 of Default Folder X is available. It updates its tracking of cloud-sync services (OneDrive, Dropbox, Box Sync and Google Drive) to handle changes that Apple is requiring for macOS 12.3 compatibility. OneDrive and Box Sync were recently updated, and this resulted in Default Folder X’s Recent Files and Recent Folders menus no longer showing items that were synced to your Mac by those services. This update fixes that.
Default Folder X 5.6.4 also works around a bug in Chromium-based web browsers that rendered default folders inoperable if they depended on the type of file being saved. This impacted Google Chrome, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera and Microsoft Edge.
And finally, I fixed a bug in Default Folder X’s logic for expanding and minimizing Save dialogs depending on previous usage and whether the OK and Save buttons lie on-screen or not. It now works as it should in all scenarios and all applications.
Release notes and download links for Default Folder X 5.6.4 are available on the Default Folder X release page, or if you’re already running Default Folder X, by choosing “Check for Update” from its menu in your menu bar.
So I was reading Howard Oakley’s Eclectic Light Company blog, as I often do (and you should too), and he mentioned the taskpolicy command line app, which I wasn’t aware of before. taskpolicy allows you to demote a process to “background priority,” making it run more slowly by giving it a lower priority for its disk and network access and – key point here – on M1-powered Macs, also runs the process on the M1’s efficiency cores instead of on the performance cores.
That got me thinking… if there’s a command line tool to do this, there must be a system API to make this happen, too. And lo and behold, the setpriority( ) system call will actually perform this neat trick, even though the man page lies and says it won’t.
I made some changes to App Tamer yesterday to add this, and App Tamer now has a new checkbox:
Turn the checkbox on, and whenever an app isn’t frontmost, App Tamer will give that app background priority, reducing its disk and network priority and switching it over to run on an M1 efficiency core. Running a few apps that consume quite a bit of CPU looks like this in Activity Monitor:
In my initial testing, the feature seems to work quite nicely. App Tamer automatically moves apps between the performance and efficiency cores as you switch between apps. So far, I haven’t found any downsides to this – but then again, I just added the feature yesterday and have only done limited testing. It’d be great to actually quantify whether this delivers additional battery life.
If you’d like to give it a try, you can download App Tamer 2.7d1 here. Just unzip it and run it, then click on a cpu-hungry app in App Tamer’s process list and turn on “Run this app on an M1 efficiency core” – that’s it. App Tamer will automatically lower the app’s priority when it isn’t frontmost.
Note for users of Intel-based Macs: On your machine, the checkbox is named “Run this app as a low-priority process” because your Mac doesn’t have separate efficiency and performance cores 😢. The app will be demoted to background priority so it uses fewer CPU and I/O resources, but I’m afraid there’s no fancy cpu-juggling involved.
Version 2.6.5 of App Tamer is available, sporting fixes for a few things that have come to my attention since the last release. Specifically, App Tamer’s Force Quit command, which you can get to by Control-clicking on any app in the process list, now ensures that the app is terminated even if it’s being very uncooperative.
Some UI inconsistencies have also been fixed, including small changes to the text color and font size used in App Tamer’s icon in your menu bar. And there’s a fix to App Tamer’s high-cpu-usage-detection warnings so that if some helper process (like one of Safari’s web content renderers) uses lots of CPU, App Tamer tells you to limit Safari’s CPU usage to fix the problem, rather than complaining about the helper process itself.
This release also includes the “inverting” of an existing feature to fill the niche left by the demise of the app Hocus Focus. App Tamer already offered an option to hide particular apps after they’d been idle for a certain amount of time, but if you wanted that to apply to all applications, you had to turn the feature on for every app individually. Now you can set up all apps to be hidden after 5 minutes (or whatever) in one fell swoop by using these commands in Terminal:
The first command turns on the “hideWhenIdle” feature, while the second sets the “minutesUntilHide” time to 5. You can obviously use any delay you want for minutesUntilHide. To turn the feature off again, just set hideWhenIdle to zero:
Also, if you want a few apps to wait longer to hide, you can override the time using App Tamer’s normal hide-when-idle feature, accessible in the settings popover that you get by clicking on an app in the process list. Or to prevent the app from being hidden regardless of how long it’s been idle, enter zero into the edit box next to the slider.
As usual, concise release notes and download links are available on the App Tamer Release page, or if you’re already running App Tamer, by choosing “Check for Update” from utility menu at the bottom of App Tamer’s window.
