Is there a mac app that will post a growl notification when an app starts/stops responding?

Question

Basically, I want to get a growl display when either an app starts beachballing, or when a previously beachballed app wakes up and starts taking UI requests again. Does such a beast exist?

Answer 1

I've never used Keep-It-Up but I can't think of anything else that does this (if it in fact works). It has a few strikes against it—not updated recently, costs money, and PPC build.

If you wanted to know when an application had crashed that would be possible with a shell script, but knowing when an app is not responding is a pretty tall order.

Edit: Here is a shell script I just wrote to check if an application is running:

#! /bin/bash

app="/Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari"

checkrunning=$(ps -u username | grep $app | grep -v grep | grep -c $app)

if
        test $checkrunning -gt 0
then
        exit
else
        growlnotify $app is not running
fi

To get this working you would need to:

1. Enter your username in the script.
2. Put the path of the app you want to monitor in the app variable in the script, keeping the quotes. I used Safari as an example.
3. Set it to run once every X seconds or minutes with launchd or Lingon.

Caveat: I've never used growlnotify so you'll want to make sure I'm not missing an argument on that line. Also, this won't tell you if the app is not responding, just if it is not running at all, and you'll need to keep it running all the time or you will keep getting the growl notification.