MICG  Great utility to have for older PPC Macs running Panther at least!

I've always appreciated the quality of Donelleschi software. There's not

many software developers that offer this level of quality for Mac OS X.

I don't remember any Donelleschi App. ever crashing on me. - I've got the V2 bundle.

For intel Mac owners it probably won't work, but with multiple cores, why would you need this anyway?

This is an older Mac OS X utility from Mac OS X's younger days. Find something else for 10.5 if you want something, but any Donelleschi software is worth a try. Check the System

requirements of the App.  
(Version 1.0.5)

ELEGRAPHY  Cunning Fox use to be great and neat program on my PPC Tiger PowerBook Ti. However after I upgraded to Leopard, it's no longer working properly. Every open program shows 4095MB on their memory bar, although the main Memory indicator shows the total memory in correct numbers.

I went to developer's site for more information on this. The Cunning Fox page still online, but seems like he drop the program from his store. Does this means he's no longer support this program anymore? I really hope he can make it compatible with Leopard.  
(Version 1.0.5)

RPITCAIRN  Tried it out on my iMac G5. Not good. Some programs just froze and could not be activated again. Had to quit them, or force quit, to get them going again.

Time consuming and awkward. If it worked as said might be useful but was problems from first try.  
(Version 1.0.5)

GRYPHONENT  Written to the developer repeatedly... no reply. No support. Will go for App Stop instead... at least it is in active development, which cannot be said about Cunning Fox (still no universal binary available!).  
(Version 1.0.5)

OCHYMING  The app. is neat.

The developer is SUPER.  
(Version 1.0.5)

RAWSWEETS  Great app - plan to purchase. It's fun for all us geeks who like to squeeze every ounce of power from our beloved macs.

It works as promised, and is terribly stable; I stopped iTunes while playing a song and VLC while playing a movie. It's like freezing your applications in time.

This is not speed freak, nor does it renice apps like speed freak does. And no, you can't stop apps in activity viewer, only force-quit them.

Feature wish-list:

More intergration with Mac finder and application switching. There is a slick alert that appears when you try to use a stopped app, but it only appears if you DON'T access it via the dock.

Where's the option to hide or renice? Since, we're dealing with application management, why not include everything that's been done? The finder allows you to hide apps - which often reduces CPU load - and renicing is a step below stopping an application. These actions should be available as much as the others.

Improved interface. This app looks straight from a Linux box. The toolbar is nice, but shows a stark contrsat to a standard cocoa app. A distracting foxhead is the "application" menu for this app and that's plain weird. Lastly, the author isn't concerned about using hot corners or palettes for the interface. Instead an uncompromising yellow square is the whole of the app's starting point. There are plenty of ways to make a (primarily) invisible app accessible - read: dragthing drawers or hot-corners.

Great work and a fine app.  
(Version 1.0.5)

ANONYMOUS  Activity Monitor's CPU usage is based on the update frequency.

0.5 sec is going to take much more CPU time, than a 2 sec refresh

-jd  
(Version 1.0.5)

STICKMAN67  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'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", like renicing. It simply allows you access all of the processing power of your CPU from within a given application, when and as you choose.

And just for the record, I've found it very stable, and I like that I can specify in which corner of the screen to put it's very small icon, ready to pop up as I need it. Also, using Activity Monitor to "spy" on Cunning Fox in the background, I notice that Cunning Fox uses 11 MB of RAM and doesn't seem to use any CPU in the background. Activity Monitor, on the other hand, uses some 23 MB of RAM and ranges up to just over 20% CPU usage in the background. So yes, it's free and it comes with the OS, but there is a performance penalty, it would seem.

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.

Incidentally, lest I be accused of it (though this site it nowhere near as bad as another, similar one I won't mention), I'm not the developer, or related to or a friend of the developer. I'm not even on the same continent. I just happen to think some of the preceding reviews were a bit unfair.  
(Version 1.0.3)

ANONYMOUS  i was not aware that activity monitor can pause/stop and continue applications. how do you actually do this?  
(Version 1.0.3)

ANONYMOUS  What's wrong with Activity Monitor, which can do this and is built into the OS?  
(Version 1.0.3)