Today I’m making publicly available the first beta version of my new Echowaves Notofier for OS X.

The Echowaves Notifier is a simple OS X status bar application that will provide updates for when you have new messages in any conversations you follow on Echowaves.com.

The app is pretty simple at this point, but the core functionality works and I’m hoping to get some people to test it out. Next up is adding growl support and some user preference options.

The source code is available on github.com and the application is released under the MIT License so feel free to hack away on it if you like. If you do, please submit back any modifications so they can be included back into the “official” release.

This is probably because of the spindump utility that OS X launches to create crash and “hang” reports located in /Library/Logs/HangReporter.

This is all fine and good, but spindump has an annoying habit of thrashing your system disk and eating up a sizable chunk of RAM. Personally, the MAJOR annoyance isn’t worth the aggravation just to get a useless “hang” report like the following.

Date/Time:      2008-07-09 16:33:26 -0400
OS Version:     10.5.4 (Build 9E17)
Architecture:   i386
Report Version: 4

Command:        Skitch
Path:           /Applications/Skitch.app/Contents/MacOS/Skitch
Version:        1.0b6.2 (1.0b6.2 (v10678))
Parent:         launchd [107]

PID:            377
Event:          hang
Time:           7.75s
Steps:          1

I’m sure there are many ways to disable this utility, but here is a quick an easy method I used to prevent the “sluggishness” after an app crash

sudo -i
cd /usr/sbin
mv spindump spindump.disabled
ln -s /usr/bin/true /usr/sbin/spindump

Problem solved!