Category: Software

10 years ago software was developed by people in small cubicals coding all day. Ok, maybe thats a little bit of an exaggeration, but for the most part software companies pumped out a new product every year that had new features that the users of their software just had to have. The software companies didn’t really have that much interaction with their client. Software development today is rapidly changing today. Software is built to accomadate what the user really needs not what the developer thinks the user needs. Software companies like Macromedia ask their user base what features they want in the software, what they think the software needs…

Continue Reading

I’m very happy to announce the release of App Stop 1.0! This release encompasses months worth of work and hopefully makes for a very solid 1.0 release for App Stop…

Continue Reading

While browsing the forums over at Cprogramming.com, somebody posted a link to a full PDF download of Advanced Linux Programming. I skimmed through the chapters and it looks pretty good, since I’ve never really read a book on linux/unix this should be very informative.

Continue Reading

Last week I needed to combine a couple of PDF’s together. I thought ‘I’m in this advanced operating system it should be easy’. Well, it wasn’t, and the solutions out on macupdate.com and the like were either shareware (I wasn’t going to pay $20 for such a simple task such as this), or didn’t output the PDF correctly (for instance, you couldn’t search/select the text that previously was searchable/selectable). I was kind of annoyed that simple task like this could not be completed on such a modern operating system such as OS X; so I wrote my own program and thus PDFCombine 1.0 was born. PDFCombine uses the new PDFKit framework introduced in 10.4 to do all the hard work, so it was really very easy to write the program…

Continue Reading

I’ve just released App Stop 1.0b. The following fixes & changes have been made: Fixed a bug where applications that should be in the menu bar item’s menu, weren’t Upgraded AGProcess to .5, which fixed a few small bugs that were occurring Some small speed optimizations I rewrote the background-application update algoririth, ands its much faster using much less CPU when checking for background-applications Fixed a bug where your selection on the table view would change to the newly added application Totally rewrote the helper application which handled peforming actions on root and other applications not running on the current UID…

Continue Reading

Recently I’ve been trying to understand the concept of interprocess communication in C. I’ve looked at some example code, read the man pages for fork() dup() pipe(), exevc() and the like; but the concept just wouldn’t sink in. Luckily, someone I met from the Kirupa Forums, njs54345 said to search google for ‘Beej’. I followed his advice and was happy I did, Beej has some awesome information. I did some small example projects based of the IPC tutorial and posted the source files on the source section of this site. If your trying to learn network, or inter process communication in C I would highly recommend those tutorials- there great.

Continue Reading

App Stop V.9 has just been released, here is the list of changes: Added the much requested support for background applications Added a UID/User-name column to the table-view Fixed problem where the menu icon would be really small on OS X 10.3 Fixed a problem where checking for updated while disconnected from the internet would report than a new version is availible Obviously the big change in this update is the support for background processes. If you are running OS X 10.3 you may experience crashes when changing preferences related to background processes. I have no idea why these crashes are occurring, hopefully I will be able to track down the problem by the 1.0 release…

Continue Reading

App Stop version .8 has just been released, it includes the following new features/enchancements: Fixed bug where CPU usage for applications running as root would display incorrectly, now applications running as root will display CPU usage as -1 Added ability to force update CPU usage Added ability to select all running applications Added ability to select all paused applications Rewrote the CPU refresh timer code, now allowing preference changes to be reflected immediatly without restarting App Stop Fixed human readable priority representation…

Continue Reading

I just came back a few days ago from vacationing in NH and immediately following vacation, going on a retreat in Massachusetts. Both were awesome! New Hampshire has to be one of the best places in the world its so rural and beautiful, if i get some motivation I’ll post some pics from my vacation. On another note, a bug has been found in App Stop that will cause it to crash… alot. I am currently working on fixing this bug, but work is taking most of my time so I haven’t had alot of time to look into it. Hopefully in next week I’ll be able to find time to fix it.

Continue Reading

App Stop V.6 is now available for download. This release includes the following features & bug-fixes: Fixed bug where stopped applications would prevent your computer from sleeping Support added for sleep/awake/shut-down operations Added preference panel Added hide application before stopping feature Added show application after continue feature Added ability to specify the icon size Added ability to set priority for applications Added authentication for lowering priority on applications Full source code is now available (To correctly view the project structure you must have Xcode 2.1) Enjoy!

Continue Reading