St. Clair Software has introduced an upgrade to App Tamer, its Mac utility that manages applications to deliver more efficient CPU usage and increased battery life.

You can now monitor and optimize the performance of your Mac even more quickly and easily with the software's completely revamped user interface, according to the folks at St. Clair. In addition to automatically pausing applications when you switch away from them, App Tamer now offers the option to limit the amount of CPU power used by an application.

App Tamer comes pre-configured to automatically manage Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Spotlight, Time Machine, Word and many other apps when they're in the background. You can customize it for other apps, as well.

App Tamer will operate on any Mac running Mac OS X 10.7 or higher. You can try App Tamer free for 15 days. A license to continue using it after the trial period is US$14.95. Users of App Tamer 1.x that bought their license after July 1, 2013 receive the upgrade for free, while those who purchased their licenses before that date can buy it for $7.95. Go to http://www.stclairsoft.com/ for more info.