Thursday 5 February 2009

Bokeh

In a moment of lunacy I downloaded and installed Bokeh yesterday. The app is intended to bring focus to the application in the foreground and allegedly improve its performance by around 12% by pausing all other apps. As I write this I can't believe I bothered to try it... but there you go.

So the 1st time I run the app I chose to focus on iTunes as it was downloading a patch for the iPhone which I didn't want to interrupt. So, having picked iTunes, sure enough everything else starts reporting as not responding... very unnerving - so unnerving I decide to un-pause everything. Its at this point the real problem kicks in as the Bokeh menu has disappeared. With no way to unfreeze any apps I was lucky enough to have Quicksilver installed and used to restart Bokeh hoping it would be able to bring my apps back to life. Unfortunately all options were disabled. The only thing I could think was to use Quicksilver to switch to iTunes and use the apple menu to shut the machine down. And even then Leopard couldn't shut down until I had forced quit every application.

The thing is, when I think it through, a 12% performance improvement means the active software may save 6 minutes in an hour. But this effect is only really noticeable for CPU intensive opperations. i.e when the user is idle. So which is better waiting with your arms crossed for 54 minutes or spending the full hour using your other apps?

Wednesday 14 February 2007

Let the blogging commence...

I've taken my time in getting round to it, but led by my interest in Loghound's RapidBlog plugin for Rapidwaver I've opened a blogger account.