Monday's Mac Gadget
by John F. Braun

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Control Your OS X Applications with App Stop!

August 29th, 2005

App Stop 0.9 (Donationware)
Michael Bianco

In the not-so-good old days of computing, personal computer operating systems would run multiple programs using something called cooperative multitasking. This approach required a program to consume resources when it needed them, and release them when it was done. If this didn't happen, an application could cause the entire system to slow down and perhaps crash. The good news is that Mac OS X has a UNIX core, which support a more sophisticated preemptive multitasking algorithm. Despite this, you may still want to control your applications...

There may be situations, such as real-time multimedia authoring, where you may want to make absolutely sure that a particular applications gets as many system resources as possible. App Stop can help. App Stop lives in the top menu bar. When you click on the icon, a pull-down menu with all of your applications is shown, along with what percentage of processor it is using. If you select an application from the list, it will be in a Stopped state. Clicking on it again will start it.

The menu can show only foreground processes (which is probably your best choice) or all processes, which includes background processes. Be careful here, unless you really know what you are doing, messing with background processes could put your machine in an undesirable state. There also a table view, which shows quite a bit more information, as well as allowing one to change the priority of an application. This could be useful if you'd like an application to get as much processor time as possible.

There are preferences to fine tune your experience, such as how often processor and background application usage should be measured, and to display or hide an application when stopped or started.

So get control of your applications and processes, and give Stop App a try soon.

Have any other gadgets that you'd like John to stop and check out? Just send an email to John.

Monday's Mac Gadget is here to help you with those cool things that we all just have to have on our Macs. Shareware, Freeware, Postcardware, Emailware, and even commercial apps, Monday's Mac Gadget is here to help you find and use the best of these programs.

John is a software engineer who works in the corporate R&D group of a Fortune 500 company, focusing on all aspects of communications technology. He has several degrees that claim he knows what he's doing when it comes to computers. After watching co-workers reinstall Windows, search for device drivers, and experience other horrors during the day, he's glad that he comes home to a Mac (compatible) computer. Have any comments, suggestions, or favorite Gadgets? Drop John a line at

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