Cunning Fox - 1.0.5

Cunning Fox is a tool to stop and continue the running applications under mac os x, so that you can "pause" other applications to gain optimal performance for a specific application moreover it also provides information about application such as CPU usage memory etc.

Just like it says it's a GREAT tool to kill running applications that are locked up - non responsive -etc. never has failed me and it's been a life saver, as I overwork my Mac to the limit and beyond 100% of the time.

Well, I registered the program today. It works. . .the problems with Ap Enhancer are gone. Very nice program. And the problem of the program not loading even though the load on log in option was checked has been addressed. Received and email from the developer suggesting that I manually add it to my start up programs which I did and now it works flawlessly.

The program does what it's supposed to do.

If this developer would listen to the feedback AND his emails (I've sent him 2 with no reply) then perhaps he would fix it so that it works with Unsanity's Ap Enhancer. Like most, I've got lots of programs that utilize Ap Enhancer and I won't give them up just to be able to use this ap.

Developer GET IT FIXED and you'll find lots of us PAYING for it and USING it. But, if it's a shoot out between your ap and AP Enhancer. . .you lose.

This app works well for me now that I've uninstalled APE. Prior to that, Cunning Fox would open and the little icon would appear in the bottom corner of my screen, where I set it to go, but I couldn't make the main window pop up. Now it works just fine. I wonder if the reviewer below, who can't seem to get past the splash screen, has APE installed.

I've found Cunning Fox very useful when I'm trying to carry out some sort of processor-intensive task while leaving open, but stopped, in the background other apps that would normally be if not hogging, then at least competing for processor time. For example, I often have Word open in the background while I use InDesign. For tasks that are a little processor intensive, like search and replace, I can temporarily "turn off" Word (which even as I type this is, according to Cunning Fox, merrily using between 9 and 20% of my CPU time in the background), thus freeing up the processor for InDesign.

And it works. In apps that display a progress bar or running percentage to show the rate and amount of completion for a given task, processor-intensive jobs run noticeably faster on my Mac (G4/500, OS X 10.3.4, 640 MB RAM) when I pause background apps so they're not also using up valuable CPU time.

And unlike some "CPU accelerators", this doesn't rely on any tricks. It simply allows you access all of the processing power of your CPU from within a given application, when and as you choose.

I highly recommend Cunning Fox, and imagine it might be especially useful to those who have older, slower machines and who want to maximise their productivity in processor intensive apps like InDesign, Photoshop, and so on.

Try renicing apps to +20 if you want them to slow down for other apps. That's a much more stable (and $15 cheaper) solution compared to simply pausing apps.

There are apps out there to do that. Or just % sudo renice pid