How often do you open the Activity Monitor on your Mac, just to quit a running application? The Activity Monitor is not difficult to use, but if often takes a minute or two to open – for some this is a minute too long.
If you’re looking for a really quick way to kill running applications, meet AppKiller. It’s a simple Mac app that lives in the menu bar and lets you kill running applications in one click.
Here’s how to kill running applications form the menu bar with AppKiller.
Download AppKiller from this Web page. You will see it linked within the text, towards the bottom.
You will need to unzip the downloaded folder and drag AppKiller.ap to your Applications folder.
Once you run AppKiller, you will see its icon in your menu bar. Click on it to display all of your running applications and simply click on the application that you want to kill. Clicking on a running application will immediately kill it (without a verification message), so be sure that you indeed want to quit the application before clicking.
By default, your running application list is sorted by PID (process identification number) in ascending order. However, scrolling over the Preferences menu option will show even more sort options.
For instance, you can sort by CPU usage or Memory usage. This makes it easy to find and kill those CPU or memory hungry apps that may be slowing down your Mac. From Preferences you can also display all process, only your processes, or only your windowed processes.
Plus, the “Click sends” menu options let you change the BSD signal that you send to your running applications via a mouse and via a keyboard shortcut. The option “Killed” is selected by default, but there are many other options like: quit, terminated, suspended, stopped, information request, and more.
Note: AppKiller is a 64-bit application and runs on Mac OS X 10.8 or later; an Administrator password is required to install it.
Charnita has been a Freelance Writer & Professional Blogger since 2008. As an early adopter she loves trying out new apps and services. As a Windows, Mac, Linux and iOS user, she has a great love for bleeding edge technology. You can connect with her on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn.
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