Peek-a-Boo, I See Your CPU

Peek-a-Boo, I See Your CPU — Clarkwood Software’s Peek-a-Boo, one of my favorite utilities under Mac OS 9 and before, has now been rewritten for Mac OS X. Peek-a-Boo is a process watcher; it displays the applications and Unix processes running on your computer, along with lots of data about them. Unix geeks and Mac OS X mavens may be tempted to dismiss Peek-a-Boo as merely a graphical front end to tools like "top" and "ps," or a partial duplicate of Apple’s own utility Activity Monitor. But graphical front ends are good, and Peek-a-Boo does make it easy to do tricky things such as constructing a running graph of an application’s CPU usage over time, or changing an application’s priority ("renice"). It would be great if Peek-a-Boo could do even more – for example, it might show an application’s open files ("lsof") or disk activity ("fs_usage"), graph memory usage over time, and so forth – and it’s a pity that Peek-a-Boo is itself something of a CPU hog. But users may still find it a useful addition to their bag of Mac OS X tricks. Peek-a-Boo is $20 ($10 for previous owners), and a fully functional demo is available as a 565K download. [MAN]

<http://www.clarkwood.com/peekaboo/>