MenuMeters 1.3 review
DownloadMenuMeters is a set of CPU, memory, disk, and network monitoring tools for MacOS X.
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MenuMeters is a set of CPU, memory, disk, and network monitoring tools for MacOS X. Although there are numerous other programs which do the same thing, none had quite the feature set I was looking for. Most were windows that sat in a corner or on the desktop, which are inevitably obscured by document windows on a PowerBook's small screen. Those monitors which used the menubar mostly used the NSStatusItem API, which has the annoying tendency to totally reorder my menubar on every login.
The MenuMeters monitors are true SystemUIServer plugins (also known as Menu Extras). This means they can be reordered using command-drag and remember their positions in the menubar across logins and restarts.
The CPU Meter can display system load both as a total percentage, or broken out as user and system time.
It can also graph user and system load and display the load as a "thermometer". The menu for the CPU Meter contains several pieces of information I like to have a single click away (uptime, load average, open Process Viewer, open Console).
The Disk Activity Meter displays disk activity to local disks on the system (anything that is a IOKit BlockStorage driver). It is hotplug aware, and will show activity on FireWire and USB disks as they are mounted. The Disk Meter menu shows volume space details for local drives (it does not display mounted network volumes for speed reasons).
The Memory Meter can display current memory usage as either a pie chart, thermometer, history graph, or as used/free totals. The Memory Meter menu shows a breakdown of current memory usage and VM statistics. The Memory Meter can optionally display a paging indicator light.
The Net Meter can display network throughput as arrows, bytes per second, and/or as a graph. Both the arrows and the graph are scaled using a user-selected scaling factor and calculation. Scaling can be done on the basis of actual link speed reported by the network interface or peak traffic and can use one of several scaling calculations. The Net Meter menu shows current interfaces and their status. Interface information is gathered from the SystemConfiguraton framework and thus is MacOS X network location aware (to prevent interfaces from appearing in this menu see the FAQ).
Here are some key features of "MenuMeters":
Net meter now supports "orientation" preference to determine if transmit or receive is on top of display.
New net meter graph style "Inverse Opposed" that reverses the orientation of the "Opposed" mode graph.
Net meter menu content now includes peak throughput for the interface.
Narrow throughput display to 4 digits in all cases. Patch from Alex Eddy (arekkusu at mac.com).
Option to remove zero traffic baseline from network graph. Based on code from Alex Eddy (arekkusu at mac.com).
Net meter display uses separate color for inactive interfaces. Based on code from Da Woon Jung (quarkkiller at yahoo.com).
Disk activity indicator lights using color arrows on top of the boot disk icon. Based on artwork from Nate Friedman (natef at ForgottenNewbies.com).
All history graphs allow a shorter (11 pixel) length.
What's New:
[FEATURE] Universal binary for PowerPC and Intel.
[FEATURE] Swap file usage and encryption status on 10.4 (Tiger). Based on patches from Michael Nordmeyer
[FEATURE] Update load average calculation to better match 'top', patch by Michael Nordmeyer
[FEATURE] Disk activity indicator with large color arrows on boot disk icon. Based on patches from macrulez
[BUG] Fix problem caused by Cisco VPN where the primary interface (the VPN connection) can't be found in the interface list.
[BUG] Fix disk meter problem for volumes with UTF8 characters in the name (iPods are a common example).
MenuMeters 1.3 keywords