Freeze Frame: Stop an Application in its Tracks

Posted by Greg Healy on 02/11/08 in Featured, Utilities

Freeze Frame If you use a lot of processor-intensive applications, you know how annoying it can be when they all fight for processing power. Your Mac can slow down considerably when there are 3 or 4 applications all sharing your processor. If you have ever wondered if there is a way to make each app wait its turn, you can now turn to Freeze Frame.

Freeze Frame, from Elgebar Studios, is a very simple menubar application. The application is no more than a drop-down menu that shows you a list of running applications, allows you to “Focus,” or quit Freeze Frame.

FreezeFrame list When you click on an application name in the Freeze Frame list, it “freezes.” Literally. The application name becomes grayed out in the list, and it ceases to use CPU. If you try to use an application while it is being frozen by Freeze Frame, you will get a “beach ball of death.” Clicking the app name again in the list will un-freeze it. You can freeze as many applications you want at a time.

The feature I use most of Freeze Frame though, is Focus. When you click “Focus” in the menu, all other open applications will be frozen except for the active one. This is handy when you want an application to finish its process quickly, by having full range of processing power.

Activity Monitor: Un frozen

Now though apps that have been “frozen” by Freeze Frame will no longer use any CPU, they will continue to use RAM. Yes, even though the apps are not technically doing anything anymore, they still use up RAM. Also, Freeze Frame only works on applications in the dock. All menubar apps will continue to function normally.

Acivity Monitor: Apps Frozen

The only problem I have ever experienced with Freeze Frame is it sometimes listing an app twice in its menu. This isn’t that big of a deal, but can get confusing when trying to figure out which one will actually freeze the application when clicked.

Overall, Freeze Frame is a handy little gem that has earned a permanent place in my menubar. Most of you will probably recognize Freeze Frame as MacHeist loot (which is where I came across it), but those of you who didn’t participate in MacHeist can pick up a copy of Freeze Frame for $14.95 from the developer’s website.

And if anyone can tell me how I can get iTunes to stop using 41% of my CPU, help would be appreciated.

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Dan said on

February 11th, 2008 at 8:49 am

I use Freeze Frame as well (I got it in the MacHeist bundle). Very useful for me as I often use powerhouse apps like Logic and Photoshop which take a large amount of resources to run. I can simply use “focus” to effectively “power-up”. I do wish that it had an option to freeze everything but the active application and the finder though, as I often browse for files while working in the above applications, and it would save an extra click or two.

shadownight said on

February 11th, 2008 at 5:41 pm

It’s “ITS”, not “IT’S”. Damn you, ubiquitous mistake!

Greg Healy said on

February 11th, 2008 at 5:57 pm

@shadownight: Fixed and noted.

Geoff Pado said on

February 11th, 2008 at 6:17 pm

Thanks for the review, Greg! I posted a response at http://www.elgebar.com/blog/2008/02/11/macapper-review/ to try and address some of the problems you had.

KraigMac said on

April 2nd, 2008 at 12:45 pm

Freeze Frame Rocks -
I’m a professional graphic designer web developer I commonly have Photoshop, lightroom, Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, Brige, and Acrobat running along with Safari, FireFox, etc.
.
Freeze Frame allows me to freeze those apps that are not being used at that time of development with the quick action to reinstate the app of choice quickly.

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