The multi-tasking Mac is always running
I was inspired by Laurie’s “How do you use your
Dock?” question to think about paying tribute to those glorious applications that are so useful we keep them
running all the time. And how brilliant it is that our OS X Macs can handle so many concurrent programs without
conflict! Let us pause for a moment of silence to remember the dark years of OS 9, and finally put to rest that torrid
affair with the Extensions Manager. Requiescat in pace.
What is your list of must-have apps that are always running?
Mine are
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Andrew Ho said 8:39PM on 9-01-2005
Glancing down at my doc now, it looks like it's
PGP
Safari (for Gmail)
Terminal
iSync (for my Palm)
NetNewsWire
iCal
Stickies
Omniweb
and also TextMate, when I'm doin' some coding.
Reply
Jeremy said 1:56PM on 7-25-2005
Butler
SSHKeychain
Spell Catcher X
SubEthaEdit
Reply
Laurie said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
Barb beat me to the punch with this one :) My always-on list:
LaunchBar
Entourage
SpamSieve
Safari
Show Desktop
Drop Drawers X
CopyPaste-X
StickyBrain
iChat
BBEdit
Now Up-to-Date & Now Contact
Reply
Fred said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
Here is the stuff I'm running all the time...
Safari (for surfing)
Firefox (for web development & testing)
Mail.app
Terminal
Emacs
iChat
LauchBar
Skype
SSHKeychain
iTunes
Reply
David said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
DragThing
QuicKeys
LaunchBar
SpellCatcher
DevonThink
Entourage
iClip
LocationX
WeatherPop
Reply
Dave Taylor said 10:07PM on 9-08-2005
Wow, I have a lot less running: Safari, Entourage, Adium, Terminal, Palm Desktop and iTunes. If I could get Stickies to not take up space in my dock but still be running, I'd have that running all the time too. :-)
Reply
Franklin said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
Safari
Mail
DEVONthink
Hog Bay Notebook
TextEdit
Tofu
Stickies
QuicKeys
Butler
Codetek VirtualDesktop
LaunchBar
LittleSnitch
Reply
Doug said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
iTunes
Safari
Mail
TextEdit
Preview
Calculator (often, but not always)
Doug
Reply
mu5ti said 5:40PM on 9-01-2005
1. Quicksilver
2. MenuMeters
3. Firefox, with some bells and whistles (Adblock, scrapbook, Sage, Aronnax's wonderful themes, customised userContent.css and hostperm.1)
4. Sidetrack
5. LittleSnitch
6. USBOverdrive
7. iTunes and MS Word (former depending on the mood, latter on the workload).
Reply
Aladin said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
As few as recquired. Safari and Entourage, Dragthing, ICQ since where all multi-tasking goes when OS X or App is heavyly writting into disk or Safari loading few bakground tabs? And when you don't have tons of MB of RAM. Where it goes? To the knees. For sure it's still heaven compare to OS 9 even on old HW.
BTW why OS is not made the way that Simetric Multiprocessing would work od OS level and not App level. I mean OS would divide App tasks to processors and App don't need to care how many of them is in machine. All App would be MP ready! No need to wait for Adobe and others to wake up.
Best
Aladin
Sorry my English it's not native. :-)
Reply
mns said 6:15PM on 12-13-2005
Mail.app
NetNewsWire
Safari
XChat for Aqua
iChat
BBEdit
iTunes
Terminal
SSHKeychain
Quicksilver
Reply
thoughton said 2:11PM on 7-15-2005
mNo-IP X
Quicksilver
Dragthing
iCal
Fire
Mail
Safari
Ecto
NetNewsWire
Address Book
iTunes
DiskTracker
Terminal
Keychain Access
Reply
Ian Henderson said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
Terminal (often with vim running in it)
LaunchBar (I'm one of the few people who likes this better than QuickSilver, go figure)
Finder
Mail
XShelf
iTunes
iChat
Reply
Tialaramex said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
To Aladin re: SMP
That's exactly how it works. Each Application has one or more threads that do independent work (e.g. when you're using a spray can in Photoshop, one thread might draw how the result looks on the full-size screen, while another updates Photoshop's preview window). The Operating System automatically schedules these threads from any number of applications to run on however many processors you have.
However the OS can't divide up an Application which wasn't made that way by the programmers. If it did, you might Print a document that hasn't really finished Loading, and it would come out incomplete, or calculations might be done in the wrong order in your home finance software and you can't pay the mortgage. So that's what the Application programmers mean if say they have to do some work to support SMP. They have to divide their program up carefully into pieces which can run independently. The OS does the rest for them.
Reply
barb dybwad said 4:41PM on 10-07-2005
I want to thank the folks who mentioned and tipped me off to DEVONthink - I'm seriously drooling over DEVONthink, DEVONagent and DEVONnote, all 3! Thanks!!
Reply