The multi-tasking Mac is always running

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!!

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.

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

mNo-IP X Quicksilver Dragthing iCal Fire Mail Safari Ecto NetNewsWire Address Book iTunes DiskTracker Terminal Keychain Access

Mail.app NetNewsWire Safari XChat for Aqua iChat BBEdit iTunes Terminal SSHKeychain Quicksilver

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. :-)

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).

iTunes Safari Mail TextEdit Preview Calculator (often, but not always) Doug

Safari Mail DEVONthink Hog Bay Notebook TextEdit Tofu Stickies QuicKeys Butler Codetek VirtualDesktop LaunchBar LittleSnitch

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. :-)