Keep It Cool While Site Building with Tunabelly’s TG Pro: Temperature Monitoring, Fan Control, and Diagnostics for Mac Users

TL; DR: Whether you own an older iMac or the latest MacBook Pro, Tunabelly’s temperature monitoring, fan control, and diagnostics app can help keep your device running smoothly. The privacy-centric solution, known as TG Pro, allows users to easily monitor CPU, GPU, logic board, and hard drive temperature, manually boost fan speed, and check battery health. Mac lovers, design and site-building agencies, and everyone in between should keep an eye out for the upcoming TG Pro 3, which will introduce problem-solving resources designed to help users diagnose and fix common overheating problems.

It’s an all-too-common scenario for Apple devotees. You’re knee-deep in Photoshop or iMovie, creating content for a site-building project you’ve put off for far too long, and your MacBook’s fan is protesting — loudly. You can feel the temperature radiating from your keyboard as your feverish machine slows to a crawl.

But the persistent hum of your fan doesn’t have to leave you hot-headed. With the help of Tunabelly Software’s flagship app, TG Pro, macOS users can gain control of thermal management. The solution makes it easy to monitor CPU, GPU, logic board, and hard drive temperatures — and manually adjust fan speeds accordingly.

“With TG Pro, you can see what’s going on inside your Mac because it’s kind of like a black box; you can’t really tell what’s going on,” said Matt Austin, Founder of Tunabelly. “It’s helpful to be able to see all the different temperature sensors and what the fans are doing to ensure your hardware is working as it should.”

The app also works on autopilot, notifying users of temperature events via email, the macOS Notification Center, or a CSV log file, and leveraging automatic settings to keep devices running cool and fast.

So as not to add to overheating problems, TG Pro runs unobtrusively in the background using minimal resources. Users can reference the app’s menu bar icon to quickly view all internal temperatures and access fan controls.

Best of all, TG Pro works on all devices that run macOS, from older 2008 models to those with the new T2 security chip, as long as you have macOS 10.10.3 or higher (which covers virtually all Macs). Whether you’re site building on your 2017 Macbook Pro or rendering video content on your 2020 iMac, TG Pro has got your back.

Matt, a self-professed Apple fanatic, has worked in the Windows and macOS development space for the last 25 years.

“I’ve worked as a developer for a wide range of companies, including Corel, FileTrek, GridIron Software, Interset, and QImaging — all the time observing and learning from what worked and what didn’t,” he said. “And I’ve always loved programming on the side; learning new things, trying new technologies.”

His first venture, Particles, is a particle designing solution for Cocos2d, an open-source software framework commonly used to build 2D games. The app, which empowers users to create professional particle emitters for iOS, macOS, and Android, didn’t garner much interest, but Matt said it was more of a passion project.

That changed in 2011 with the release of Disk Diet, a clean-up app Matt designed to free up gigabytes of unnecessary files on Mac devices in minutes or even seconds.

“I didn’t expect to do super well, but it really did,” he said. “That led me to believe that maybe I could do this full time.”

With that, Tunabelly was born. Today, Matt is still hard at work on an assortment of macOS, tvOS, and iOS apps. Along with TG Pro and Disk Diet, Tunabelly’s catalog now includes everything from QR Factory, a customizable QR code creator, to Folder Tidy, a solution for organizing files and folders.

Matt told us TG Pro is his most popular app to date.

“Over the years, the idea has been to keep adding more features, ensuring compatibility with the newest Macs, and providing the best customer support possible,” he said. “The goal is always to get back to customers as fast as we can, and people seem to appreciate that.”

In addition to user-friendliness and comprehensive diagnostics, Matt designed TG Pro with data privacy firmly in mind. In fact, he can’t tell you all that much in terms of user demographics — and that’s a very good thing.

“The people who use it seem to be tech-savvy and privacy-conscious, but I can’t tell you exactly what the breakdown is because I purposely didn’t build any analytics into TG Pro,” he said.

TG Pro even includes support for Little Snitch, a network monitoring app for macOS that alerts users when an app attempts to connect to a server on the internet.

“With Little Snitch, you can tell if an app is trying to make a connection somewhere, and you can monitor what an app is doing with network traffic,” Matt said. “We include built-in Internet Access Policy support for TG Pro users who are using Little Snitch — every connection is documented. Users can see that there are no extra connections or data tracking.”

TG Pro has also been notarized by Apple — a process in which the company scans software for malicious content and code-signing issues. It also includes Hardened Runtime, which, according to Apple, protects an app’s runtime integrity by preventing exploits such as code injection attacks, dynamically linked library hijacking, and tampering attacks on process memory.

Macs are the computer of choice for many development and site-building agencies — and for good reason. macOS is open-source friendly, boasts built-in features tailored to creative professions, offers a consistent user experience, and is great for checking compatibility across browsers.

To make temperature monitoring, fan control, and diagnostics easier and more accessible for Apple users at the agency-level, TG Pro includes a remote deployment option for simple endpoint management. Matt told us the feature came in response to a customer request.

“You can deploy TG Pro remotely and configure it with the preferences you want for each endpoint,” he said. “Since it’s a silent install, the user doesn’t see anything. They don’t have to enter a license. Everything’s done through the command line.”

From an ROI perspective, then, TG Pro offers development and site-building agencies a chance to mitigate any problems before they become cost centers. The app’s notification feature, which sends out emails if temperatures exceed a specified threshold or diagnostics fail, is particularly helpful in this regard.

Matt said he plans to release a separate monitoring app to help users manage TG Pro deployments in the future. In the meantime, he’s been busy ensuring compatibility with Apple’s latest Macs, which will be shipped with proprietary Apple Silicon chips, rather than Intel chips, beginning in late 2020.

“Whether you buy Mac, iPhone, or iPad, it’ll be the exact same CPU designed by Apple,” he said. “This is a huge change in terms of the entire low-level architecture where the fan control happens. I’ve ordered one of their developer kits, which includes a Mac mini with the Apple CPU in it, and I can confirm that I will be able to support the new series of Macs coming out with the Apple Silicon chips.”

But that’s not all — Matt said he’s currently working on TG Pro 3.0, which will include a slew of new features inspired by customer feedback.

“The next version will give users a greater ability to see why their fans are running on high or why their computer is getting hot,” he said. “Whereas the current version of TG Pro provides a view into the problems, the new version will help the user fix them.”

Interested in taking TG Pro for a spin? Take advantage of the company’s free 14-day trial, which includes all features except hardware diagnostics. It’s currently on sale for half off, at a one-time purchase of $10.