Reclaim your (OSX) memory with iFreeMem!
It was with no small amount of excitement that I came across TUAW’s review of iFreeMem 2.0. A long time problem of mine has been OSX’s memory management - my machine is constantly going into swap for no apparent reason and reboots were being forced much more frequently than I’d have liked. Bear in mind that I put 4GB of ram into my iMac for the express purpose of having a crapperload of memory.
iFreeMem is an app that utilizes magical elf technology to reclaim your memory after you’ve been running awhile. It isn’t the most polished app, kinda basic looking and it’s window disappears from view if you do things wrong and various other ui problems. But none of that really matters since in the end, no matter what you’ve clicked on and what’s disappeared from view, it clears up all sorts of memory for your happy reuse. (UPDATE: Oh, I just realized, the window disappears, but the app puts a little piechart of your memory usage in the menubar near the time which brings the window back. Nice!)
I’ve used it only a couple times and it seems to work very well, it may or may not be psychological, but I haven’t needed a reboot in awhile, which is a very happy circumstance for me. It’s got a 15 day free trial, which I still happen to be in, and then you can either pay $19 or work with TrialPay. Initially, I was really annoyed because I thought TrialPay was some wierd scam to get access to the free trial, but it turns out, the free trial is free and TrialPay provides an alternative to paying the $19 to the author. I guess it’s kind of interesting, it allows you to shop somewhere else which then gets you the software for free. Techdirt thinks it’s kinda cool. I guess I got no beef with it since it is just another option - you can always pay if you don’t like it and if you were going to shop wherever anyway, maybe it’s just a gimme.
Anyhow, it works well for me, if you’ve got some memory issues you might want to give this a shot. Their website is super, super slow - at least it was for me, so be patient, but it’s pretty worth it, I think.
