Filed under: Hardware, Software, Features, Cool tools, Productivity
First Look: iStat menus beta and screenshot gallery
For what seems like forever (or at least since April 29th, 2005), the crew at iSlayer have leveraged their obsession with system performance and statistics and provided us with arguably the best darn donationware iStat widgets on the block. For a little while now, they've been teasing their fellow stat enthusiasts with screenshots on the iSlayer blog of their latest creation, iStat menus, which is currently in a private beta. As you might guess, iStat menus is an app (installed and managed as a System Preferences pane) that will display your vital system stats in the menubar, complete with a thoroughly customizable set of options for displaying just the information you want to know.
Thankfully, the iSlayer folks were kind enough to give me a copy of the beta, along with permission to post thoughts and a screenshot gallery for your perusal. While I've been trying iStat menus out, I've also been asking the crew a few questions surrounding how it stacks up against iStat pro and nano, especially in terms of performance. One catch with the way iStat menus runs is that it doesn't create its own separate process that can be monitored in Activity Monitor (or, I assume by relation, the Terminal). Instead, each menu item monitor you activate runs as a Menu Extra which lumps itself into the SystemUIServer thread, so the only way Marc Edwards at iSlayer recommended I could compare iStat menu's performance against my long-time favorite iStat pro is simply to watch that thread before and after enabling iStat menu's items.
After some testing, I'm happy to report that iStat menu's performance is definitely better than its widget counterparts. Before switching on each of iStat menu's monitors (at their default settings, mind you), my SystemUIServer process was running at around 16.5 MB of Real Memory, and 243.5 MB of Virtual Memory. After flipping all those switches, my SystemUIServer process only rose to 19 MB and 247 MB, respectively; that's a mere increase of 2.5 MB and 4 MB. Compared to iStat pro's 10.2 MB / 231 MB resource usage just on its own, I think it's safe to say that iStat menu offers a significant boost in performance and drop in resource consumption whilst monitoring those very aspects of your Mac. It's a win-win in my book.
But what is iStat menus capable of monitoring, you ask? It's capable of almost everything the iStat widgets are, though it looks like one or two options - such as a battery monitor - have been left out, possibly because iSlayer didn't have any functionality to add to a menubar battery monitor above and beyond Apple's (though I would personally love the option of a couple more power profiles to work with). Here's a quick list of iStat menu's modules, though you can also see these in our screenshot gallery: CPU, Memory, Drives, Network, Temps, Fans, Bluetooth (a bonus here: battery monitors for your Bluetooth keyboard and mouse), Date & Time and - deservingly - a Donate panel.
Beyond that, check out our screenshot gallery for a rundown on all the finer details and features of iStat menus, and stay tuned for a public release. iSlayer assured me they're very close, as they've held an extended beta testing period to ensure a nice, smooth ride once this goes live.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Steve said 1:32PM on 5-18-2007
How does it compare to MenuMeters?
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ThunkDifferent.com said 1:35PM on 5-18-2007
Great Scott! This is a good widget. I prefer the pro over the nano (for colors alone) but the menu-bar would be a nice enhancement. Thanks for the photo gallery mac daddy.
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Joab O said 1:38PM on 5-18-2007
"How does it compare to MenuMeters?"
It has a MUCH nicer GUI and has more features such as bluetooth monitoring for your mouse/keyboard, temperatures (supports Intel!), time and date worldwide feature, oh and fan speeds. I'm currently using the private beta and it beats menu meters hands down.
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Enriegnat said 5:21PM on 5-18-2007
In all honesty, I need somebody to sell me on why I need to check my machines preformance.
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Gabriel Radic said 2:31PM on 5-18-2007
Looks much busier than MenuMeters.
http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/menumeters/
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Mystic said 2:39PM on 5-18-2007
#3 Joab: Can you compare the resources it uses compared to MenuMeters?
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sergio.delagarza said 3:10PM on 5-18-2007
It looks fkn awesome :D
i want it now hehe
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Hervé S. said 4:40PM on 5-18-2007
iPulse (http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/9969/ipulse) has a menubar mode which IMHO manages to present *more* things in three times less space...
(more things: for instance, a separate visualization for incoming and outgoing data flows)
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DeMarko said 5:11PM on 5-18-2007
I've wanted in on the beta for a while, never found where to do that though. I can't wait for a release ^_^
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Donovan Bond said 12:01AM on 5-19-2007
Yeah, I'd like to know the comparison to MenuMeters. It suits my needs fine.
Enriegnat - I HAVE to install MenuMeters on my machine now. It's great for having immediate visual feedback for how stuff is running (is an app using a ton of processing power, what's my download/upload speed from different places etc).
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prostafink said 6:09AM on 5-19-2007
Is there an option to turn it back to an normal menu?
The islayer UI is usually nice and fits perfectly for widgets, but I don't like the widget UI on the normal desktop. Black menus doesn't seem to fit there.
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Blake said 7:33AM on 5-21-2007
This looks promising but what I would really like is something that combines many of the features of this and:
MenuMeters
MiniBatteryLogger
SlimBatteryMonitor
smcFanControl
Net Monitor
MagiCal
MenuCalendarClock
I have used a combination of these but they all have their advantages and disadvantages. And having them bundled into one application would be preferred so that their interfaces are consistent.
I want the ability to not only shows current usage in the menu bar but also have the ability to log usage to be viewed and displayed in graphs later on.
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Jono said 7:04AM on 5-29-2007
Looks really promising, but can you change some fo the menu bar icons? Some of them (HD, MEM & CPU) look awful.
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