Tame your login items
Control login items and hidden processes to make your Mac more stable
If someone asked you to list all the apps running on your Mac, your first instinct might be to prod ç+† and show them the app-switcher. But that only tells you half the story. In some cases, apps comprise multiple processes, each performing a different task. You’ll also find apps and processes that aren’t standard, and therefore don’t launch and quit in the same way. Some may be menu-bar extras, living in the menu bar and lacking a Dock icon and any app-switcher presence. Others might be ‘faceless’ apps, lacking a visible interface and waiting in the background until needed; beyond this are hidden processes that can be components of applications you’ve installed, or a part of OS X itself.
In the background
For the most part, OS X’s engineering means your Mac should tick over regardless of what’s running – hidden or otherwise. But if you’ve an older Mac, a penchant for installing and trying out a ton of trial software, or are just plain unfortunate, you could find your Mac gradually – or even abruptly – slows right down to a crawl.
In some cases, errant background programs are to blame. Some lock up and refuse to work, thereby potentially stopping an app or system component performing a particular task. Others go wrong, grabbing RAM and processor cycles, robbing your Mac of the resources it requires to do the things it needs to do.
For standard apps, it’s usually easy to tell when something goes wrong, and also to fix it. An app freezes up, and the spinning rainbow beachball appears; you grumble a bit and force-quit the app by ≈- clicking its Dock icon, holding å and selecting an option.
For hidden processes, it’s not so simple, as we show on the following page. You need to delve a little deeper into your Mac. You might therefore wonder why such programs exist at all,
For hidden processes, you need to delve a little deeper into your Mac in order to deal with them
but, in many cases, it’s about bettering your user experience. Some apps are so small they don’t need space in the Dock or app switcher; others perform important system-wide tasks, so you’re unlikely to want to manually launch them. Imagine how frustrating it would be to launch Photo Stream as well as iPhoto every time you wanted to sync photos, or a driver for a piece of hardware whenever you wanted to do something straightforward, such as scan a photo or print a document.
And then there are processes that perform important tasks regarding backing up and syncing files – you certainly wouldn’t want to manually launch those every time you wanted to perform such actions.
Daemons and agents
In OS X terminology, background programs and processes are broadly split into two categories: daemons and agents. Daemons are designed to be a part of the system, can run without a user logged in, and cannot display any interface. Agents run on behalf of a user, and can display information when needed. As you’ll see on the following page, the launching of each type of background process can be controlled by you, although doing so can require removing files in Finder. It’s also possible to identify and quit such processes in Activity Monitor, found within Applications/Utilities. Some have arcane names, but many are in plain English (or at least identifiable through an app or developer being part of their titles), especially helper programs for apps you’re running. If you see something you’re confused by, there’s a good chance it will be listed at macinside.info/ browse.php or triviaware.com/ macprocess/all. Craig Grannell