Mac tip of the day – Monitor CPU usage in the dock.

By scott

Maybe I am the only one out there who didn’t know this feature existed on a Mac but I stumbled upon it tonight. As a Flash Developer I am constantly watching the CPU usage when I am QAing my work. I am also constantly fighting for screen real estate.As developers we have all experienced memory leaks, have accidently forgot to delete intervals or even worse ENTER_FRAMEs, or have tried to implement an animation where the animator went a little crazy with some filters. Prior to Flex 3′s Profiler us Mac users had to open our Activity Monitor and try to jam it in the corner of the screen where we can see the browsers CPU Usage column through all the other windows open. Tonight I figured out how to show the CPU Usage in the dock.

1. First open the Activity Monitor
2. Right Click (or click and hold, or CTRL click) on the Activity Monitor icon in the dock and select ‘Keep in Dock’ (if it’s not already there)
3. Right click on the Activity Monitor icon again and select the ‘dock icons’ menu
4. From the ‘dock icons’ menu select the ‘Show CPU Usage’ item
5. There you have it, a nice little visual representation of your CPU usage, it is even separated by cores (if applicable)

Like I said at the beginning of this post, a lot of you probably already knew this and stopped reading this post after the first sentence. However I do know there are a lot of developers switching to Mac, so this Bud’s for you…err…post’s for you.

Fix for no sound in Flash Player or Quicktime on a Mac

By scott

Not sure if this is a known issue, or a known fix (workaround). It’s a weird one. For whatever reason, I was getting no sound when test publishing (Command Enter) from the Flash IDE. I also noticed I wasn’t getting any sound when viewing a quicktime video. So I decided to scour the web for a solution. I found one.

Turns out all you have to do is open up GarageBand, create a new project, play a few notes on the piano (I chose Beethoven’s 5th, followed by Push It by Salt n Pepa – I don’t think these songs had anything to do with the fix), close GarageBand, and viola, sound again in the Flash Player and Quicktime.

I’m not sure why this works. Does anyone out there know why? Or better yet, does anyone know a proper fix for this? Mr. Jobs, are you reading my blog?