MenuMeters 1.4b1

MenuMeters 1.4b1 is a useful tool designed as 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. MenuMeters is open source freeware released under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Major Features:

1. 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 Activity Monitor.app, open Console.app).
2. 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).
3. 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.
4. 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 Mac OS X network location aware

Enhancements:

• Snow Leopard compatible Universal Binary (ppc, i386, x86_64).
• Includes MenuCracker 2.x for Snow Leopard and for better long-term compatibility with other menubar add-ons.
• Hide more inactive statistics on inactive network interfaces.
• Simplified Intel CPU naming ("Intel" not 80486).
• Support for IPv6 addresses in the network menu, based on patches from Smith Kennedy.
• Major code cleanup, fixing a number of obscure bugs and probably introducing some more.
• Changes to various menubar displays and text for readability and general cleanup. Removed various tweaky options (like disabling antialiasing) that haven't been relevant since very early OS X and aren't worth the maintenance cost.
• Remove CPU menu option for 'nice' color, hasn't worked since Apple API changed.
• Removed CPU menu thermal register statistic, hasn't worked since G3.
• Reordered memory pie chart to place wired at the start of the graph.
• Fixed NSNumberFormatter overflow for memory statistics.
• Fix preference reset when opening preference pane on Leopard and later.
• Fix support for the PowerMate regardless of driver version.
• Fix Connect and Disconnect commands for VPN and other complex interfaces controlled by the PPP subsystem.
• Show disk space for mounted NTFS volumes.
• Fix slow disk unmount/eject on Tiger.
• CPU percent user/system split display includes nice'd process. This matches current implementations of 'top'.
• Simplified Chinese localization, thanks to Tintin.

Requirements:

• Mac OS X 10.2 or later
• PowerPC or Intel based Macintosh (Universal Binary).