Imagine if you could pause and unpause apps on your PowerPC Mac, so it could focus all the CPU power it can muster toward a single app? This is precisely what the app Bokeh does, which sits as a Rose Icon, on the menu bar.

It doesn’t always stop everything from going on in the background, but most of the time it’s able to “hang” mostly everything, putting other open apps in an unresponsive state until you unpause it. If you leave it on for long enough with Activity Monitor being the app in focus, you’ll notice apps “Not Responding”!

On Your Mac

• Download: Bokeh.zip (Low End Mac Software Repository, 742 KB)
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• Compatibility: Universal, works on Intel Macs as well as PowerPC. Mac OS X 10.5 or newer.
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• Once downloaded, just Drag-N’-Drop to your Applications folder.

Does it make a difference?

It seems to mostly work when you have many apps open, and want to focus on one at a time. I thought this was something which could do a little more than just pausing running apps. And while this seems to be the case observing Activity Monitor; all other app processes go down to 0% usage when Activity Monitor is “focused” on. On the other hand, apps like Temperature Monitor still peak through the system, providing updated temperates for many sensors in the system, every few seconds.

First picture, with opened apps:

Second picture, using Bokeh to focus on activity monitor: Notice how the CPU % goes down to 0% for nearly all other processes.

So it seems like this isn’t any sort of placebo effect, but rather a real way to hang other apps (and perhaps even the other non-important processes) to get the absolute most out of your Mac, getting all the processing power it can muster – all for one app (or more) of your choice. It’s a nice power user tool.

I can imagine this being a good app for those running productivity apps which don’t need other apps open concurrently; as well as those running games, especially those which could use every last drop the PowerPC chip can give.