Bokeh - Give Your Apps All the Processor Power Possible

Have you ever been on your Mac, happily typing or browsing away, when suddenly your computer... started... feeling... very... sluggish? What likely happened is that one of your programs, for whatever reason, started taking up more than its fair share of system resources, whether those resources were processing cycles or RAM.

For whatever reason, that program (often times not the one you are currently using), decided it needed more and more resources, which left the rest of your programs sucking air, in effect. As the one program took more and more resources, there was less and less for everything else, so your Mac had to split up whatever was left and spread it among the remaining running applications.

Not fun.

Other times, it's the opposite. You'll be doing work in some program, only whatever you're doing just doesn't seem to get done quick enough, because you have a lot of other programs running in the background. These might be email programs, chat clients, or something similar. But the point is that since they're running, your Mac has to allocate at least some resources to them, which means the program you really want to use gets less.

Enter a simple shareware utility called Bokeh. Bokeh is a menu bar item that allows you to focus all your system's resources on a single program. It does this, in effect, by cutting off - completely - all the other running programs. So if you're using Photoshop or iMovie, and are doing some heavy encoding, and don't want your Mac to give your email program or web browser any resources, just go to the Bokeh menu and select whichever application you want to focus on from the dropdown menu. Almost immediately, every other running application (including the Finder, so be careful!), will become completely unresponsive. This frees up your "important" application, so you can get things done faster.

I decided to try out Bokeh, to see if it was really as good as advertised. To start with, I launched a few applications (you can see the list of applications in the screen shot), and then selected one of them to receive all my system resources. The way Bokeh allows you to do this is a bit odd, but it worked.