Freeware February: MenuMeters
The pick I had planned for today just
happened to coincide with a question sent in via our ‘send us tips’
link, by Dennis from the Netherlands. Dennis, by the way, knows how to grab our attention… he started
off by paying TUAW lots of compliments!
Dennis asked if we knew of any program that would monitor his net connection, “showing some cool graphs about
howmany bit/bytes were being transported through my aiport extreme card. Maybe also showing some statistics, how many
mb I transfered this week/month.”
The first app to come to mind was MenuMeters, from
Raging Menace. MenuMeters is a set of true
Menu Extras (aka SystemUIServer plugins, which means they can be reordered with command-drag and they remember
their positions in the menubar across logins and restarts) that monitors CPU, memory, disk, and network statistics. It
doesn’t show stats by day/week/month that I am aware of, but it does show just about everything else.
Using the MenuMeters preference pane, you select
what information you want MenuMeters to display, what interval you want it to update and which icons to show in your
menubar. You can even control how your PowerMate
behaves in reaction to various CPU load conditions. Clicking on any of the menu extras pulls down more detailed
information, making no stat more than a single click away.
MenuMeters is open-source freeware released under the
GNU General Public License (GPL). Download
it today!
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Oliver said 4:15PM on 6-16-2005
MenuMeters rules, but Dennis from the Netherlands might also be interested in iPulse or AquaMon.
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/17033
and
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/14386&vid=120011
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Laurie said 4:15PM on 6-16-2005
Excellent suggestions, Oliver. I'm going to check those out myself!
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Thad said 7:46PM on 7-06-2005
It can make your PowerMate glow based on CPU usage?
Killer! I'm downloading this!
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Dennis said 6:18PM on 11-17-2005
Thanks all. Great help.
I didn't look at ipulse (because i think 12,95 is a bit to much for some graphs). I did look at Aquamon, and I think it's a bit too geeky for what i want. all those digits are too much.
Until now menumeter does just do what I want it to do, although the graphs could look a bit sexier.
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Spain said 4:15PM on 6-16-2005
Menumeters is about the only third party system enhancement I have ever installed and decided to keep. I used ipulse for a while, decided it was a gorgeous piece of well written software ... that I didn't really have a use for and took up too much screen real estate. So I don't use it.
Menumeters stays out of my way, right up there next to my airport meter & modem status, telling me only CPU load and network tx/rx and NOTHING ELSE I don't need.
I can't say I've ever used aquamon, but for my money (or lack thereof) menumeters is a great bit of software.
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Oliver said 4:15PM on 6-16-2005
I've actually stopped using MenuMeters recently. I still love it, but I got sick of being told how much CPU I was using. I know that loading a couple of pages in Safari while listening to iTunes consumes 100% of my lowly 450mhz G3 processor, and I just don't need to be reminded of that all the time :-p
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