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I’ve been playing around with the new Mac OS X Lion “file versioning” facility. Ars Technica as usual provides an insightful and detailed explanation of this new feature; Krypted.com provides further low-level details (but, see below).

File versioning is, essentially, a consumer-level and user-friendly version control system. Coupled with Lion’s new autosaving functionality, it aims to change and hopefully simplify the way users think about documents. For example, as you type your Pages or TextEdit document, you don’t need to worry about explicitly saving your work: Lion does this for you every once in a while, when you quit the app, or when some other event occurs that requires the system to preserve your work so far. For instance, you can email the document you are working on without first saving it, because Lion does it for you (so what you are sending is exactly what you have written so far). The bottom line is that, ideally, the user should never worry about losing her work. Saving is now a logically distinct operation: it means that the document is currently in a state that the user wants to preserve for possible future reference, even though she may want to continue editing it. Hence, the semantic change in the corresponding entry in the File menu: “Save a version.” If you use a version control system, consider this: “saving” a file just preserves the changes you’ve made, whereas “commiting” a file to a repository makes sure that, should further edits introduce bugs, you can always roll back to working code. In Lion, “saving-as-preserving” happens automatically, whereas “saving-as-committing” requires explicit user intervention, as it should.

There are antivirus programs available for every operating system, including Windows, Mac OS, Android, iPhone, and even Linux. Lifewire / Tim Liedtke The word 'antivirus' is a misnomer, considering that most of these applications can also clean any form of malware from your system, not only viruses. As I am new to the Apple OS X, I struggled installing the Line6 driver on my Mac. The installation showed success, but after restarting I could not use the connected.

SwiffCore is a Mac OS X and iOS framework that renders vector shapes and animations stored in the SWF format. It also provides basic support for bitmaps, fonts, text, and MP3 streams. It isn't a Flash runtime. It doesn't enable you to run your interactive Flash games on iOS. MacOS succeeded the classic Mac OS, a Macintosh operating system with nine releases from 1984 to 1999. During this time, Apple cofounder Steve Jobs had left Apple and started another company, NeXT, developing the NeXTSTEP platform that would later be acquired by Apple to form the basis of macOS. My previous post dealt with how versioning and non-versioning apps interact under the new Mac OS X Lion release. I now turn to some low-level sleuthing. The motivation is, in a way, similar: I am interested in how command-line tools such as rsync may deal with versioning.

Both autosaving and versioning are application-level, not system-level features: that is, they must be supported by each individual applications. This is similar to other Lion features, such as full-screen mode. As you will see, I think this is a very good thing, because—in my opinion—these features do not necessarily make sense for all applications, or in all circumstances. On the other hand, this raises an important question: how do these features interact with traditional file access, be it command-line or Finder-based, or simply via non-versioning apps? If you use Dropbox, this question is relevant: what exactly gets synchronized? Indeed, Dropbox is essentially a fancy front-end to the rsync utility, which I use directly for my work backups (in addition to Dropbox); again, how do versioning and autosaving interact with it?

Autosaving does not present any problems in this respect: once a file is named, further changes are saved just as if the user was a compulsive CMD-S hitter (that is, me). So, rsync and friends work just fine; there are some subtleties related to accessing a file with both a versioning and a non-versioning app, but nothing that interferes with usage: see below for details. The situation for file versioning is a bit more complicated. To investigate possible adverse effects, I had to explore the implementation of this feature. There is some information on the Internet (again, see the aforelinked articles), but a lot of details are missing, and I should warn you that I myself did not go very far—although I did uncover a few interesting tidbits. In case you are wondering, the publicly accessible Apple developer documentation has essentially zero implementation information about file versioning. For all practical purposes, Apple wants you to treat this feature as a black box.

First, the bottom line: file-level access is not hindered in any way by file versioning either. You can continue using Dropbox, rsync, or more generally any non-versioning app, and you will get pretty much the same functionality in Lion as you did in Snow Leopard. This is excellent news. On the other hand, changes made to a file using any non-versioning app will not be versioned by the operating system: again, versioning is an application-level feature, not something that is enforced by the OS. This is probably good, although it does mean that, as far as I can tell, there is no easy way to, for instance, back up versions of a file using rsync (except in a rather inefficient way). Now for the details. This post describes how accessing files with both versioning and non-versioning apps might work from a user, or app perspective; in the next, I turn to some low-level details I was able to uncover, and that I haven’t seen explained elsewhere (but, feel free to provide references if you find them).

Interacting with non-versioning apps: UI considerations

Again, the basic thing to keep in mind is that versioning is application-specific (although possibly, different apps may access the same file and keep a consistent versioning). At the same time, there is no problem accessing files from non-versioning apps. It is best to describe some concrete use cases. The TextEdit (TE) app saves RTF files, which can be opened and edited in any text editor; I used Sublime Text 2 (ST2) as an example.

Here’s a typical, fully-versioned workflow:

  1. Create a file in TE
  2. Add some text, then “save” or “save a version” in TE
  3. Now add more text in TE, and quit without saving
  4. Reopen the file with TE

In this case, the window title shows “Edited” next to the document name. Instead, consider the following:

  1. Create a file in TE
  2. Add some text, then “save” or “save a version” in TE
  3. Quit TE
  4. Now open ST2 and add more text, then save and quit
  5. Reopen the file with TE

The newly added text will show up in TE; however, the window title will not show “Edited” next to the document name. Also, the cursor will be where it was when you quit TE. Importantly, no new versions are created. In other words, versioning must be implemented along the following lines. First, upon quitting in step 3, TE saves the state of the document under consideration: that is, it records that no editing occurred after the last explicit save. Second, the next time you run TE in Step 5, it reloads the document and the configuration file where its status is saved. The latter configuration file indicates that the user did not edit the document after explicitly saving it, so, as far as TE is concerned, the document is exactly as it was when the user quit TE in step 3, even though it is not.

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Again, the way to make sense of this behavior is to think that it is the application (i.e., TE), not the OS, that provides the versioning feature. If you modify a file outside TE, clearly TE knows nothing about it: you shouldn’t expect TE to keep track of such changes. On the other hand, there is one downside with this approach. Consider this sequence of events:

  1. Create a file in TE
  2. Add some text, then “save” or “save a version” in TE
  3. Add some more text in TE, so the file is now marked as “Edited”
  4. Quit TE
  5. Now open ST2 and add more text, or delete existing text, then save and quit
  6. Reopen the file with TE

Upon reopening the file in TE, the document will be marked “Edited.” However, the state of the document will of course reflect the edits done in ST2: the document state at the time you quit TE in step 4 will be lost. In the previous scenario, this was not the case, because we did an explicit save before quitting TE; thus, any change we did in ST2 could be undone by rolling back to the previously saved version. However, this option is no longer available to us in the present scenario. Again, this cannot be helped: TE knows nothing of the modifications in step 5, so when it opens the file in step 6, it just knows that some changes were made since the last save—not which changes.

The bottom line is that, if you know you will be editing a file using some non-versioning app, as well as a native, versioning app, it is a good idea to explicitly save before quitting. This is, after all, what you have been doing all along—save your documents before quitting, or sharing. The only difference is that Lion-native apps feature autosaving, and hence don’t force you to save upon quitting: you have to remind yourself to do so.

“No matter what I do, my Mac is still slow”, an average tech-consultant hears this phrase multiple times a day. Give a person even the most powerful computer, and pretty soon it will be cluttered with apps, extensions, and things that are too much for it to handle. To reverse it, one has to go back and сlean up the mess, removing memory agents one by one. Prepare for a fight — every byte of memory is at stake. So let’s put your Mac on a diet and get it more free RAM to breathe freely.

First, remove desktop clutter. Get a combination of Setapp apps that clear away unneeded desktop files.

Download Declutter Free

“Your system has run out of application memory”

How do you know your Mac is low on memory? Floating “rainbow wheels” aside, you may notice your Mac now takes ages to load. You’ll also see many browser applications crashing. You’ll be also thrown warning messages as “Your system has run out of application memory”. To help it, you should first visit the Activity monitor to see memory usage on Mac.

How to check RAM usage on Mac

Go to Applications and type in Activity Monitor in the search bar. This invokes a good old Activity Monitor that should tell how much free memory you’ve got left.

A shortcut to open Activity Monitor:

Press F4 and start typing Activity Monitor in the search bar.

I’ve attached a screenshot from my Mac and as you can see my memory usage almost reached full capacity. Here’s what it all means:

App memory: taken by apps and processes
Wired memory: reserved by apps, can’t be freed up
Compressed: inactive, can be used by other apps
Swap used: memory used by macOS
Cached files: memory you can really use

Notice the colored graph under Memory Pressure. If your graph is all but red and yellow, your Mac is really gasping for fresh memory. It seems counter-intuitive, but “available memory” your Activity Monitor is not that important after all. In fact, it’s a system intended behavior to use all memory resources when available. On the contrary, the Memory Pressure graph is much more telling, so grow a habit to check this graph in the Activity Monitor every now and then.

How to check CPU usage on Mac

Open the CPU tab in Activity Monitor to keep in check CPU-heavy processes. Normally an app would be using 0-4% of CPU. If it takes abnormally more than that, go inside that particular item in the list and press the Quit button.

How to free up memory on Mac

Tip # 1. Remove Login Items to lower Mac memory usage

Login items are programs that load automatically upon Mac startup. Some of them covertly add themselves to the list and this is no good. If you’re looking to free up RAM, they are the first candidates for deletion. Don’t worry, you’re not deleting the app itself, you just stop it from auto-launching every time.

So, to remove Login Items and at the same time reduce your memory usage of your Mac, you need to:

  1. Open System Preferences and select Users & Groups.
  2. Click your nickname on the left.
  3. Select the Login Items tab.
  4. Check programs you don’t want to load as your Mac starts.
  5. Press the “–” sign below.

Now, you won’t see these apps pop up the moment you turn on your Mac. Although this method doesn’t require some superpowers of yours, some special Mac optimization and memory cleaner tools may do the job faster and ensure the smooth performance of your Mac. CleanMyMac X is an excellent example of such software. Here’s how to disable Login Items with CleanMyMac X:

  1. Download it for free and go to the Optimization tab.
  2. Check Login Items to see the list of apps that get opened when you start your Mac.
  3. Click Remove.

As you’ve already come to the Optimization module of CleanMyMac, you can also fix hung apps and heavy memory consumers there. In this way, you’ll free up the solid amount of RAM on Mac — 100% free of charge.

Tip # 2. Free up disk space if Mac is low on memory

The available space on your Mac’s drive translates into virtual memory. This comes to save you when you’ve run out of physical RAM. So now your computer relies on your hard drive space to keep your apps going.

The classic geek rule of thumb holds it that you should keep at least 20% of disk space on your startup drive. Not only this potentially reduces your future spending on iCloud storage but it also keeps your Mac speedier.

What to delete to free up space:

  • Large unused files, like movies
  • Old downloads
  • Rarely used applications
  • System junk

But here’s a simpler solution to save your time — clean up your drive with CleanMyMac X— the app I’ve mentioned above. Many users recommend it as an excellent way to free up more space because it searches for large & old files, useless system files, Photo junk, mail attachments and shows everything you can safely delete. Interestingly, it finds about 74 GB of junk on an average computer.

Extra trick: How to free up RAM on Mac with CleanMyMac X

If you have downloaded CleanMyMac, you may also take advantage of its amazing feature — the ability to free up RAM in a few seconds. Try this next time you see “Your system has run out of application memory” message.

  1. Go to the Maintenance tab on the left.
  2. Click Free Up RAM.
  3. Click Run.

As simple as that!

And you can do it even if you download a free version of the app.

Tip # 3. Clean up your Desktop

This tip always comes at the bottom of instructions and unfairly so as it is quite effective. Without even looking at your Desktop I would assume it’s cluttered with mountains of icons. Thing is, your macOS was designed in a way that it treats every Desktop icon as a little active window. The more icons, the heavier memory usage on Mac. So in order to release available memory resources, it’s recommended to keep your Desktop clean.

You don’t have to do it all by yourself. With apps like Declutter and Spotless, every desktop cleaning session will be scheduled in advance and executed automatically. Your only job is to define the rules on how your files should be organized.

Tip #4. Clear cache files

Mac

Another way to free up RAM on Mac is to clear it of cache files. Of course, it won’t save you gigabytes of space, but deleting cache regularly, you can help your Mac run faster and avoid system issues.

So, to remove cache files on your Mac, you need to:

  1. Open Finder.
  2. From the Go menu, select Go to Folder.
  3. Type ~/Library/Caches in the field and press Go.
  4. In the window that appears, you will see all your cache files.
  5. Press Command+A to select all files or delete files one by one.
  6. Enter your user name and password to confirm.

If you find some files still in the folder after you emptied it, maybe you have some windows open on your Mac. Just like that, you can save up some space on your Mac. Don’t forget to empty the bin afterward.

Tip # 5. Tune up Chrome’s Task Manager

Although Google Chrome is not the one to blame for massive memory usage, it can indeed affect your Mac's performance. If you use Chrome as your primary browser, you probably have many windows opened there. Chrome runs a lot of processes to ensure a fast browsing experience for you. So, it uses your RAM for storing your tabs, plugins, and extensions. Look at how many entries Google Chrome has in Activity Monitor:

The question then arises, 'Why does Chrome use so much RAM?' The thing is that each process is responsible for a separate plugin or extension of your browser. For example, when a tab unexpectedly falls, you need to refresh it to continue your work there. If one process were responsible for all tabs and extensions, you would need to restart the whole browser instead. Can you imagine how many times would you do that? That’s the proper answer to why Chrome uses so much RAM.

I’ve been using Chrome for some years only to discover (recently) that Chrome had a task manager of its own. You can use it to force quit memory-heavy processes in the browser. It’s a handy tool because it lets you see how a page weighs on CPU usage on a Mac.

  1. Go to Chrome settings (dotted icon in the top right corner)
  2. Click More tools -> Task Manager

To free up even more RAM, close the GPU process. The GPU Process, though helpful in theory to accelerate pages, eats up a considerable amount of memory. Click to end it to free up RAM on your Mac.

Tip # 6. Manage RAM usage with CleanMyMac X menu

CleanMyMac X has another useful and convenient feature for managing your Mac’s performance and memory usage. As you install CleanMyMac X and start it for the first time, it’s icon will appear in your menu bar. Click the icon to open the CleanMyMac X menu. Here you can find updates on the current condition of your Mac and perform quick tweaks to increase your Mac's speed. Whenever you feel like your Mac underperforms, open the CleanMyMac X menu to check how much RAM is available and free it up as well.

Tip # 7. Close Finder windows

Okay, suppose you’re still asking yourself, how do I clear RAM on my MacBook Pro/MacBook Air. The next trick is as magical (you’ll see for yourself) as it is time-saving. It’s no secret that each window in the Finder eats up RAM. But how many open windows are there? Some of them are collapsed or stacked in some blind spot on your screen. This Finder command merges all your windows into one. See how to do it:

Click on Finder > Window > Merge All Windows

Now you can manage Finder windows more effectively and free up memory on MacBook.

What else you can do to minimize memory usage on Mac

I’ve saved the easiest tips for the end, as long as these ones are self-explanatory.

  • Replace AdBlock (very memory-demanding) with a lighter extension
  • Keep fewer opened tabs in the browser
  • Restart your Mac more often to free up RAM
  • Close all hung-up print queues

That was my take on how to make your Mac a bit speedier to use. If you’re looking for more guidance, check simple ways to speed up your Mac.

Frequently Asked Questions

How to check application memory on Mac?

To check RAM usage on your Mac, go to Activity Monitor (Applications > Utilities). In the Memory tab, you will see all the active processes that are using your Mac’s RAM. At the end of the window, there is a Memory Used graph, which indicates how much application memory is used.

How to find out whether your Mac needs more RAM?

Your Mac may be using almost all its RAM, but you don’t need more if it’s using it efficiently. Open Activity Monitor and go to the Memory tab. The Memory Pressure graph shows the current condition of your RAM: green color means your Mac’s using RAM effectively, while yellow is a sign that some application or process is using too much of application memory. The red memory pressure signals that your Mac needs more RAM.

Mac Os Catalina

How to quickly free up RAM on your MacBook?

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To free up RAM on your Mac, firstly, you should find out what app uses so much of your memory. The memory-heavy programs are listed in Activity Monitor, Memory tab. If there is an app you aren’t using at the moment, click it and press the “X” sign to quit it. This will, in turn, free some of the application memory.