What is About?

When I first saw the System 7 Finder’s “About This Macintosh” display, I thought it looked really cool. Then I tried to make it DO something, like switch me to an application when I clicked its icon. I was somewhat disappointed when nothing happened. I was even more disappointed to find I couldn’t make the display appear automatically when I started up the Mac! So, out of frustration, I decided to write my own version.

The result is About, a process monitor. Its appearance is an unabashed knockoff of the Finder’s display; but unlike that display, you can actually use About to interact with your processes and get information on them. A little arrow appears next to the current process. Clicking an icon switches you to its process, and option–clicking an icon hides or shows that process, just like the Hide and Show commands in the application menu. You can customize the display in many ways—use large icons if you prefer, or arrange the processes by their location in memory to reveal the “holes” in your address space.

Other commands allow you to monitor background–only processes, view CPU load, create an “icon palette” of your favorite applications, find a running application’s location on disk, and force other processes to quit. About can also maintain a log of application activity.

Hecht, Michael. (1994). About About. Electronic Document.

Download About for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.0 up to Mac OS 7.6

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II