While I generally learned pretty quickly that menu bar apps add a whole lot of clutter very quickly, iStat has earned a spot on the second most coveted real estate on my screen. The first is the desktop and nothing goes there 'cept the little hard drive icons.
iStat gives you the ability to view CPU, Memory, drives, network, temp, fans, power, and Bluetooth status. You can throw all of these into your menu, or pick and chose which ones grace your screen. I personally like the CPU, Memory, Network, and oddly enough, date and time.
Date and time? Not exactly a performance measure, is it? Well no, but I happen to like it better than the default option (I hide that one in system prefs) It is more compact when you are displaying the date, and if you click the date it gives you a neat-o pop up calendar.
One thing I miss about my life in the PC world is my PC machines generally had some sort of hard disk indicator light somewhere on them. So when the PC was acting odd, I could always glance down at the hardware and see that the disk was thrashing around like mad. I was slightly clueless when my Mac did the same thing (oh yes Macs are just as capable at sucking as PCs). Now I have a cool blue icon that does the same thing. It's hard to tell from any screen shots, but it even has indicators on the icon to show if the disk is reading or writing.
The other three indicators are pretty much common stuff (you Vista users are familiar with the little desktop gadget that looks like a car instrument cluster and shows this stuff off, everyone has that one.) I have at a glance my physical memory in use, cpu usage and network activity. One cool thing about it is that you can click on one of the indicators and it will give you the top processes using the resource. This was great for finding out that our stupid printer driver goes nuts on occasion and ties up an entire core for no good reason whatsoever.
Sure, most of the stuff the app does isn't exactly revolutionary, there's tons of other apps out there that do the same thing. My favorite thing about this one is that it's a simple heads up at-a-glance indicator that takes up little screen real estate. I can easily click to get more in depth details on what's happening and even launch OS X's native task management software to kill misbehaving processes. The only thing I really wish I could do with this would be to kill an app directly from the menu rather than having to jump over to Activity Monitor.
The price is right at zero dollars, you can grab it at the iSlayer website.
One thing I miss about my life in the PC world is my PC machines generally had some sort of hard disk indicator light somewhere on them. So when the PC was acting odd, I could always glance down at the hardware and see that the disk was thrashing around like mad. I was slightly clueless when my Mac did the same thing (oh yes Macs are just as capable at sucking as PCs). Now I have a cool blue icon that does the same thing. It's hard to tell from any screen shots, but it even has indicators on the icon to show if the disk is reading or writing.
The other three indicators are pretty much common stuff (you Vista users are familiar with the little desktop gadget that looks like a car instrument cluster and shows this stuff off, everyone has that one.) I have at a glance my physical memory in use, cpu usage and network activity. One cool thing about it is that you can click on one of the indicators and it will give you the top processes using the resource. This was great for finding out that our stupid printer driver goes nuts on occasion and ties up an entire core for no good reason whatsoever.
Sure, most of the stuff the app does isn't exactly revolutionary, there's tons of other apps out there that do the same thing. My favorite thing about this one is that it's a simple heads up at-a-glance indicator that takes up little screen real estate. I can easily click to get more in depth details on what's happening and even launch OS X's native task management software to kill misbehaving processes. The only thing I really wish I could do with this would be to kill an app directly from the menu rather than having to jump over to Activity Monitor.
The price is right at zero dollars, you can grab it at the iSlayer website.
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