Peek-a-Boo Features

                           Main Peek-a-Boo Window

The main window is shown below.

On the left side of the window are the icons for each running process; each icon may have a radio button. The selected (filled) radio button shows which application is in front. Clicking a radio button brings that application to the front. This can be quite convenient for rapidly navigating running applications.

Some applications will not show a radio button. These applications (such as File Sharing Extension) are background-only applications, and can not be brought to the front.

The top of the window contains a couple buttons and a map of the Macintosh's memory.

The “Front” button brings the selected process to the front, if possible. The “Kill” button sends a 'quit' Apple event to the selected process.

The memory map shows how much of the Macintosh's memory is being used, and how it's being used. The dark gray pattern is parts of memory being used by the system. The gray portion of the memory map shows memory used by applications. If a process is selected, that process's memory is shown in black. This can be convenient, since sometimes a large chunk of memory is “blocked” by a small application in the middle of it. Peek-a-Boo lets you find these situations and deal with them; if you quit the small application, you can then launch an application that needs the big chunk. In many cases, there's even memory to launch the small application again!

Many pieces of information in the main window may or may not be showing, depending on the Preference settings. For a further explanation of each of these items, see the “Peek-a-Boo Preferences” chapter.

                               CPU History Windows

A sample CPU History window is shown below:

Each time the CPU% bar in the main Peek-a-Boo window gets updated, a new column will be added to the right of the CPU History window, resulting in a graph of CPU usage moving slowly to the left.

The solid black graph is from when the process is in the foreground; more CPU time can be expected here. The gray graph is from when the process is in the background; processes usually use less time when they're in the background.

When you open a CPU History window (from the Processes menu, or press Cmd-H), a window like the above window will open for the selected process. This information is stored, so in the future, Peek-a-Boo will periodically check to see if that process has been started and, if so, it'll pull up its CPU History window to track CPU usage. To make Peek-a-Boo forget about a given CPU History window, close the CPU History window. Then Peek-a-Boo won't include that window in its periodic search any more.

You can open several CPU History windows for the same process. While this isn't terribly useful for normal Macintosh use, it can give a marvelous “techie” feel to your Mac if seventeen history windows are plastered at random intervals on your screen.