Author: Blancer

At any given time, there’s a lot going on in your computer’s brain. You may be focusing on writing an important email or watching a video, but that doesn’t mean your CPU is likewise focusing its attention. It’s still assigning valuable resources to that open web page you have in the background and that Twitter client chirping away on your desktop.

App Tamer is an incredibly handy little app that finds all these processes and helps you pause those that aren’t important until you need them again. This helps cut down on CPU time, battery usage and even heat! Follow along as we take a closer look.

Meet App Tamer

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect the first time I fired up App Tamer. I’m fairly cautious about apps that seem like they mess with my system and loathe anything that requires lots of setup. An app in this category has potential to go wrong in both of these areas.

As soon as I fired it up though, App Tamer just went to work finding processes that I wasn’t using and pausing them. I didn’t do a single thing! A quick look at the menu bar utility revealed the basic system for how the app works. Here I could see my active processes along with how much CPU they were using in addition to the processes the app saw fit to pause.

App Tamer

As you can see from the screenshot, I wasn’t really saving much out of the gate. This was a combination of the fact that the app had only just started and that I hadn’t really dug around to see where I could give it a boost. It’s obvious though right away that Twitter is being somewhat of a beast, sitting at the top of my CPU sucking processes.

To solve this problem, I jumped into the “Application Manager”, a window where you can examine your processes further.

The Application Manager

The Application Manager shows you a list of your currently stopped applications and a graph depicting your estimated CPU savings. As you can see, after tossing in Twitter (we’ll see how to do that later), I was up to saving 35%.

Application Manager

After using the app for a few hours, I found that my typical results were even better, hovering just under 60%! When you’re running on an aging MacBook like I was at the time, that’s a pretty decent chunk of recovered CPU.

Notice the “Gaming Mode” setting, which stops everything but the currently active window.

The Details Drawer

Hitting the “Details” button momentarily stops some of its monitoring (I’m not sure why) and slides out a drawer showing a filterable list of all the relevant processes on your machine.

App Details Drawer

From here you can organize the processes by the amount of CPU they eat and in doing so easily find good candidates for taming. When you click on an app, the preview on the right updates to give you more relevant information and allow you to set the app’s priority. If you locate an app that you don’t mind pausing when it’s not in the foreground, check the “AutoStop” box to have App Tamer tell that app to chill out.

Preferences

If there’s anything you don’t like about the way that the app works, check out the Preferences section and you’ll likely find a fix. For instance, I hated the little message that kept reminding me to close the Details Drawer, so I turned it off. I also like that you can tell the app to hide or dim apps that are paused and customize the length of time before a pause.

Preferences

Thoughts About Use

I’m a total nut when it comes to managing my processes. I tend to have a million things going on at once and never look away from my iStat menu bar app for more than a few minutes so I can keep track of how my Mac is handling the tasks that I’m throwing at it.

Because of this, App Tamer really thrilled me as soon as I started using it. I was able to see clear, significant performance benefits from using the app, and that’s something that I highly value in a utility like this.

With all that being said, there is a lot to keep in mind with an app like this. Your computer isn’t doing a ton of stuff just to annoy you, active processes are often either vital or something that you’ve personally chosen to spend resources on. Many of these processes simply aren’t ideal for pausing.

For instance, as a manager, I’m in constant communication with colleagues so pausing my email client would definitely be something that would negatively affect the way I work because it would simply stop receiving email until I switched to my email app. You might have noticed that I did in fact stop my Twitter app, this obviously kills the benefits of how the app downloads tweets live as they happen. I no longer received Growl notifications when someone replied to me or sent me a private message. To be honest, in the case of Twitter, this isn’t exactly a bad thing as it can definitely be a distraction!

Also, keep in mind that paused apps take about a second to pop back to life, which sounds small but is definitely a noticeable delay when compared to the typically smooth transition from on app to another. In some circumstances I even encountered a few app crashes upon attempted wakings. These were quite rare though and not repeatable.

Conclusion: Should You Buy It?

I really enjoy App Tamer and am thrilled to find an app that seems to be so incredibly effective at resource allotment with so little effort. I definitely plan on using this app regularly and strongly encourage you to take a look.

Keep in mind, an inexperienced user looking for a quick way to make their Mac go faster has plenty of room to screw things up with this app. To me, it seems better suited to be a utility for those users at least proficient enough to open Activity Monitor and understand what’s going on.

So should you buy it? First, stop by the site and try out the 30 day trial. Open up the app and take a look at what’s eating your CPU up the most and whether or not it’s something that you mind being turned off when you’re not looking at it. If the answer is “yes”, then App Tamer is fifteen bucks well spent.

GarageBand is an awesome beginner-friendly music application which can be used for capturing and manipulating audio, making music with virtual instruments and recording your own professional sounding podcasts, plus more. All that’s required is the desire and patience to learn!

To get started with GarageBand, we shall begin by first discussing the basics behind computer music software and virtual instruments, in addition to looking at recommended hardware to help you on your way. All this will provide a foundation for future guides, in which we will record a whole song and more.

GarageBand

GarageBand is referred to as a Digital Audio Workstation or DAW. If you’ve never considered using a computer for music before then you’ve lucked out by buying a Mac, because though you can debate which professional application is the best or most well-rounded, I think it’s fair to say that GarageBand beats them all in ease of use and simplicity.

Broadly speaking and ignoring the more advanced niche coding software, there are two main ways to make music with a computer – using the computer in place of a tape deck with microphones plugged in, to capture ‘real’ sounds like vocals, or making the audio within the computer itself, with virtual instruments. Today we’ll be focusing on the latter.

In order to ensure we’re all on the same page, let’s first grab GarageBand and fully update it. If you haven’t yet got a copy of GarageBand, head over to the App Store and grab it now for a very reasonable $14.99. This guide was written with GarageBand ’11 in mind, but GarageBand ’09 should work with some minor changes.

Though beginner-friendly, GarageBand is far from limited and there’s a long list of artists who have used it to great effect, such as Rihanna on her hit “Umbrella”

What Are ‘Virtual Instruments’?

First off let’s run through what a virtual instrument (also known as soft-synth or software synth) actually is:

In the past, if you were in a standard four piece rock band with a singer, drums and guitars, but decided you wanted a short Saxophone solo to complement your song, another musician with the required skills would be needed. In the wake of home computer music software however, both budding and established songwriters are able to make use of computer-made simulations of real-life instruments.

When virtual instruments first appeared they were rather rudimentary and unlikely to fool anybody into thinking they were hearing a real instrument being performed, but over time the software has matured and reached the point that the average person’s ears won’t know the difference between sampled or synthesized virtual instruments and the real thing, if used correctly. Many movie scores, TV shows and albums are based around virtual instruments, in addition to the more obvious application such as within the electronic music genre.

A MIDI Interface Makes All The Difference

Virtual instruments reside within GarageBand but it is neither intuitive nor inspiring to play with these via trackpad or with your Mac’s own Qwerty keyboard. Though I am reluctant to encourage spending your hard-earned money when only just embarking upon making music, a MIDI interface really does make a huge difference when creating music on a computer and I recommend you purchase an inexpensive interface if possible in order to get the most from your Mac.

Korg's Nano Series offers much value for money

A keyboard MIDI interface looks much like a standard beginner’s Casio electronic keyboard, the type which we’ve probably all seen at some point when growing up. Rather than containing its own speakers or connecting to an amp however, the MIDI interface plugs directly into a computer (usually via USB) and sends data to the Digital Audio Workstation, in this case GarageBand, which then produces the desired sound.

Should you indeed wish to purchase a MIDI interface, a great place to start is the Korg NanoKey. It’s a small, lightweight portable interface about the length of a standard white MacBook and can be bought online from major retailers for approximately $30-$40 if you keep an eye out for a bargain. As with most interfaces of its kind, the NanoKey is designed to work with GarageBand without fuss, so all that is needed is to plug in and play.

MIDI is a complex subject in itself and I’m barely skimming the surface of it here in order to give a basic view of how MIDI is applied.

Launching GarageBand

Okay, now that we’ve covered some of the basics, launch GarageBand and let’s begin playing some music!

GarageBand's splash screen

Upon launching GarageBand you should see the above splash screen which lets us choose between various options. We’re going to cover most of these in subsequent tutorials but for now let’s keep it simple and click on ‘Piano’ then the ‘Choose’ button on the lower right hand side of the window.

Following the splash screen, you should now be presented with the window titled ‘New Project From Template’ shown below. You can leave all the settings as they are for now, though it may be a good idea to name your Song something memorable, such as ‘GarageBand Draft 1′.

New Project window

Using GarageBand

GarageBand's main window

Once GarageBand has launched, you should see something very similar to the above screenshot, with a Grand Piano track already loaded.

If you do not have an interface and wish to use the Virtual Keyboard also visible above, navigate to GarageBand > Window > Keyboard and click your pointer to ‘press’ the keys. Alternatively, should you want to give Musical Typing a try, go to GarageBand > Window > Musical Typing and use your Mac’s keys. If you do have an interface like the Korg NanoKey, then simply play the keys and have some fun!

Take some time to play around with the Grand Piano and get a feel for how it sounds.

Instrument Setup and Selection

Downloading all of GarageBand's instruments & loops takes up approx 1.2GB

Though the Grand Piano is fine in itself, let’s make things a little more interesting by having a browse through GarageBand’s other instruments. The ‘Software Instruments’ pane should already be visible to the left of your GarageBand’s screen but if it isn’t, hit the track info button, which is located in the bottom right hand corner of your screen.

Depending on the method by which you installed GarageBand (e.g. iLife or App Store), you may not have all the instruments and loops downloaded. To bring up the instrument download screen as shown above, click on an instrument which has a small arrow to the right of it.

Browsing instruments is fairly self-explanatory, simply choose the category of instrument from the left hand pane (such as Organs or Horns) and then select the instrument within that category (Pop Organ or Trumpet Section). You need not move on from this step for now at least, just keep testing out the different sounds. This is not time wasted, as in future tutorials it’ll come in very handy to build up a mental image of what the instruments sound like.

Conclusion

I hope this first in a series of tutorials has given you some grounding in the very basics of GarageBand in preparation for recording some tracks. Though those who are more advanced may find little to stimulate them here, I hope that the next tutorial should offer more knowledge or at least a different perspective on existing recording methods.

If you have any questions or problems, please let me know in the comments and I’ll do my best to talk you through it.

As you would expect from the editor of a Mac blog, I’m a complete app addict. I have random applications for everything from cataloguing recipes to counting characters in a TextEdit document. Some of these I use on a daily basis, but many of them admittedly sit and collect dust in my Applications folder.

This article is an attempt to narrow down my absolute bare essentials. What three things do I think are fundamentally lacking in OS X and would need to be installed on any machine that I use for more than a few hours, regardless of what I’m doing? Which apps genuinely save me a considerable amount of time in my daily routine? Let’s take a look!

Clipboard Managers

Clipboard managers are an absolutely vital tool to have if you spend a considerable amount of time at a computer. Let’s face it, your default OS X clipboard functionality is fairly limited: you copy something, you paste it, you copy something else, the first thing is gone. If you’re a real pro, you can access a secondary clipboard-like feature with Kill (Control-K) and Yank (Control Y), but no one really even knows that feature exists and fewer remember long enough to use it.

Copying and pasting is a pretty fundamental activity that nearly all computer users are familiar with and engage in regularly. It makes sense to beef up this functionality with a tool that provides a full clipboard history, which gives you access to multiple past clippings.

What I Use

There are quite a few really powerful clipboard managers on the market, but the one that seems to fit my workflow best is a completely free utility called ClipMenu.

ClipMenu

ClipMenu represents the best combination of simplicity and power that I’ve found in a clipboard manager. It has all the features I need: a completely customizable history, support for text and image clips and a keyboard activated pop up window. It even has some really powerful options that I now couldn’t live without such as a snippets manager and a robust actions system that allows you to manipulate strings of text (change the case, wrap with tags, etc.).

The thing that really makes me love ClipMenu is that it doesn’t even really feel like an app. Instead it feels like a natural extension of OS X. I’ve tried some really expensive and fancy options that I didn’t like half as much. If you’re in the market for a clipboard manager, start here.

Alternatives

ClipMenu is definitely not for everyone. If you try it and decide that you want something else, check out the options below.

• Stuf: $24.99
• iCopy: $0.99
• iClipboard: $29.99
• Jumpcut: Free
• Clips: $4.99
• Clipboard Evolved: $4.99
• Clyppan: $3.99

Launchers

I hesitated to include launchers in this article because the idea that they’re an essential add-on is arguable. For starters, Launchpad on Lion is a new and quick way to launch your apps. However, to me, Launchpad is really no better than hitting “??A” to bring up the applications folder. You still have to manually sort through all of your apps to find what you want, which is a real pain!

A more appropriate argument would be that Spotlight functions as a launcher: hit a keyboard shortcut, start typing and applications will appear at the top of the list of results. You can even perform some basic functions like simple math.

For whatever reason though, Spotlight still feels like a search tool that has some launcher functionality rather than a tool created for launching apps. For this reason, I definitely recommend that all OS X users check out third party application launchers. They can save you tons of time and tend to have some really advanced functionality.

What I Use

To be honest, I never thought I would give up Quicksilver. It was the first launcher that I ever used and still has more features, plugins and crazily random functionality than almost anything else you can find (mouse gestures, pie-shaped file menus, custom global triggers, Quicksilver has it all).

However, there’s something to be said for using software that is actively being developed and improved. I honestly can’t imagine why the developers lost interest in Quicksilver but it happened, and that left many of us looking around for alternatives. I tried to no avail to switch and always came back, that was until I tried Alfred.

Alfred

Alfred is a true gem of an app. The interface is simple and friendly but still quite attractive and the already impressive feature set is constantly growing by leaps and bounds. Much more than an app launcher, Alfred can perform complex math with parentheses (these confuse Spotlight), define words, search for files, act as a file browser, control iTunes, launch websites, search websites, access your clipboard history and a heck of a lot more. And these are just the built-in features, the new third party extension system is really starting to give Alfred the endless possibilities that I enjoyed in Quicksilver.

Alfred is a free utility but many of the advanced features require the £12 PowerPack. Alfred is so great that I tell every Mac user I know to download it right away. As far as I’m concerned, it should be the first thing you install on a new Mac!

Alternatives

Among the high-powered launcher contenders, the most popular competitor that can stand toe to toe with Quicksilver and Alfred is Launchbar, which has a similar goal of providing you with a single interface for performing a stunning number of different tasks. Check out Launchbar and other popular launchers below.

• Launchbar: $35
• Butler: $20
• Overflow: $14.99
• Sapiens: $4.99
• Launch It: $2.99
• Jumper: $0.99
• Launcher: Free
• Chuck: Free
• MoAppsLauncher: Free
• Google Quick Search Box: Free

Text Expanders

Because I’m a writer, the final category of apps that I couldn’t go without is text expansion utilities. You don’t need to write full time to appreciate these though, the concept is universal enough that almost every user can find a way to save time with a text expansion app.

If you’re not familiar with the concept, text expanders allow you to type shortcuts which then “expand” into larger snippets. For instance, if I type “email#” on my Mac, it automatically inserts my email address.

If you’re a developer, you can create abbreviations that expand into large snippets of code (perfect for those pesky CSS3 browser prefixes). If you write a lot of email, you can store standard responses that pop into place with only a few keystrokes. The possibilities go on and on: usernames, passwords, addresses, phone numbers, websites, words that you commonly misspell; anything you want! The bottom line is, what used to take 1-2 minutes to type or find elsewhere and copy over now takes two seconds to insert!

What I Use

TextExpander is probably the most popular text expansion solution currently available, and for good reason. It’s an extremely powerful and versatile tool that supports every app that I’ve ever tried to use it with. This app alone saves me hours and hours every single month. I know because it conveniently tracks this information!

TextExpander

TextExpander ($34.95) makes it easy to create different groups of custom snippets that can be expanded via a user-defined abbreviation. You can even insert smart snippets like today’s date, the contents of the clipboard or even another snippet!

There’s also an iOS app that can sync with the desktop version via Dropbox. This is great for working on my iPad, all the snippets that I’m used to using are right there and even work in several other third party apps.

Alternatives

Want to see a head-to-head comparison of popular text expansion utilities? We just happen to have one here. In the mean time, check out the options below.

• Typinator €19.99
• Presto: $0.99
• TypeIt4Me: $19.99
• yType: $14.99

Conclusion

I wear many hats as an OS X user: writer, editor, designer, photographer and musician. These three app categories serve as basic extensions of OS X that I personally would never like to be without, regardless of the task that I happen to be doing.

Leave a comment below and let us know what categories you find absolutely essential to your daily activities. Which apps save you the most time?