Many Tricks
Today’s update to Time Sink adds a feature to give you more control over Time Sink’s CPU usage: a slider that controls Time Sink’s update interval. At its default setting, Time Sink checks for changes in window status roughly twice a second. If you’ve got a lot of windows open, and a lot of collected history, Time Sink can take a fair bit of CPU power to update all this info at that interval.
Using the new slider (in the General tab of Time Sink’s Preferences), you can lower Time Sink’s CPU usage by reducing how often it checks for changes in windows. The default setting is “Often,” while the other extreme is “Seldom,” which is about once every five seconds. You can find a value along the slider that works for your needs; just keep an eye on Activity Monitor to find a CPU usage level you’re comfortable with.
Of course, there’s an accuracy tradeoff involved—the less often Time Sink checks for window changes, the more likely it is to miss some of your activities. For instance, if you’ve got the slider all the way over at “Seldom,” you’ll miss that quick trip to Mail to check for new messages, or that glance at Twitter for recent tweets. But such tradeoffs are now in your control with Time Sink 1.2. (You can read the release notes page to see the other changes in this release.)
Direct purchasers can get the new version via in-app updating, or by downloading a fresh copy from the Time Sink page. App Store purchasers should see the update available shortly in the App Store application—we’ve released the update, but it will take a bit of time to reach all of the various global App Stores.
Thank youze! This came just when I was about to send a question to the mailing list about Time Sink’s CPU usage, which, on my computer, is something between 40% and 60% *regularly* (!) which clearly is a LOT.
Perhaps I should add that I haven’t reset TS’s counter for one-and-a-half months since I’d like to have an overview of my app usage on a larger time scale, e.g. for three months.
So, this update makes me very happy.
BUT I have one wish: I prefer to have things transparent to me as a user, so I’d rather have the number of seconds (or fractions of seconds) in this option instead of the rather obscure “often” and “seldom”. Yes, I read the above blog entry, so now I know a *little* bit more than I can know from the option slider (“roughly twice a second” vs. “about once every five seconds”), but I really really want to see it IN the option itself, and not just roughly but precisely. Do you think this could be possible in a future update?
Greetings, Tom
Oh, perhaps also an even longer time interval might be nice … after all: How often do we really change between apps when we are working, when we read a web page, etc.? I tend to stay in the apps I really use (not all the small background/utility stuff) for AT LEAST 10 seconds, rather longer.
For now I’ve set my prefs to “seldom”, which, as I understand you, will check “about” every five seconds.