App Stop Changelog

Below is the full changelog of App Stop, from V.5 through V2.1.

Priority slider now increases priority when moved to the right, and decreases when moved to the left
Improved Application Manager UI
Updated preferences to look and work more like Safari & Mail.app's preferences
When items in the menu-bar list are paused they are now colored red instead of displaying "(Stopped)"
Added 'All' filter criteria
Less frequent nagging for demo users (every 2 days)
Improved crash/bug reporting (now outputs stack traces and notifies user of exceptions)
You can now specify a global shortcut that can be used to bring the Application Manager forward
Improved 'hide and stop' reliability
Your filter criteria will now be preserved between App Stop startups
Totally rewrote the 'startup at login' code
Fixed a bug where the menu item would remain in 'paused state' when an application that was paused was killed
Major memory usage enhancements
Minor performance enhancements

Features

Bugfixes

Fixed a couple issues with the application filtering/searching mechanism
Fixed bug where CPU column sorting would not work correctly
Fixed a bunch of memory leaks
CPU column will now remain sorted and will not jump to the selected application when the CPU usage is updated
Significantly reduced memory usage
App Stop will no longer report -1% CPU usage for any application
The CPU usuage reporting for kernel_task is now correct

Improvements:

Redesigned preference panel
Reorganized system-wide drop down menu
Replaced buttons on bottom-left side of table with action menu
Drastically improved error checking and error reporting
Switched from using named pipes for interprocess communication to unnamed pipes (this fixed a couple crashes that were occuring)
Improved core communication algorithm. This greatly improves the overall performance of App Stop, some operations (such as CPU usage polling, and background process polling) are 2-5x faster than before!
Improved the response and reliability of changing polling related preferences (background process polling, and CPU usage polling)

Rewrote the cpu usage code, its now much cleaner
Force quitting background applications will remove them from the list immediately
iTunes-like live searching ability added
App Stop is now a universal binary
Updated to Xcode 2.2, compiling with the latest GCC release

Added right click menu to the table view
Fixed bug where after the computer goes to sleep, the menu icon will not change to represent if their is a paused application
Added option to use a black menu icon set
Combined the image & name columns in the table view
Rewrote outputting from authnice so integers are directly outputted, instead of being converted back and forth between C strings
App Stop now requires that you successfully authorize yourself, or app stop will terminate
App Stop is now multi-account safe
Added 'App Stop Help' menu item
Some UI clean-up/polishing
Made a workaround for the weird crashing bug on 10.3, you now have to restart App Stop for preference changes in the 'Background Processes' tab to take effect
Greatly improved help/documentation

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 performing, 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 performing actions on root and other applications not running on the current UID.
This improvement brings the following features and enhancements:

Ability to retrieve CPU usage of other processes running under different UID's than the current UID
Ability to pause/resume processes running under different UID's the current UID
Ability to force quit processes running under different UID's the current UID
Faster performance for renicing applications running under different UID's the current UID

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 available

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 immediately without restarting App Stop
Fixed human readable priority representation. Now -20 is represented like it should be, as "Max"
Added 'Add to Startup Items' options in the preferences
Yet again, I redesigned the preference pane
Fixed bad bug which would cause App Stop to crash... alot
Added ability to set the table view window to float above all other windows
Added option to have an alternate image displayed in the menu bar when applications are paused