{"id":591,"date":"2007-11-17T17:20:56","date_gmt":"2007-11-17T17:20:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/blog\/?p=591"},"modified":"2014-08-04T17:49:02","modified_gmt":"2014-08-04T17:49:02","slug":"istat-menu-a-nice-alternative-to-menu-meters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/2007\/11\/17\/istat-menu-a-nice-alternative-to-menu-meters\/","title":{"rendered":"iStat Menus &#8211; A Nice Alternative To Menu Meters"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been a huge fan of the various <a href=\"http:\/\/www.islayer.com\/index.php?op=software\" target=\"_blank\">iStat products<\/a> for years. I don&#8217;t feel at home on any Mac unless <a href=\"http:\/\/www.islayer.com\/index.php?op=item&#038;id=21\" target=\"_blank\">iStat Nano<\/a> is installed. I used to use the command line tool <code>top<\/code> all the time to see what programs were hogging resources when ever my machine slowed down, now I just bring up my Dashboard and check iStat Nano. This is great but there are some things I want to keep a permanent eye on. In particular I like to keep an eye on my CPU temperature (particularly on the MacBookPro) and the network bandwidth I&#8217;m currently using. iStat Nano can show me these things but it&#8217;s not really that practical to constantly keep switching to the Dashboard. I guess that&#8217;s why <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ragingmenace.com\/software\/menumeters\/\" target=\"_blank\">Menu Meters<\/a> is such a popular application and why you see so many people using it. Personally I&#8217;ve never liked it. I always found it looked very cluttered and messy. I just don&#8217;t like the way it prints graphs in the menubar and takes up way too much room.<\/p>\n<p>[tags]iSlayer, iStat, iStat Menu, Apple, OS X, Menubar app, freeware[\/tags]<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->However, there is now a nice alternative to Menu Meters from iSlayer, the people responsible for iStat Nano. It&#8217;s called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.islayer.com\/index.php?op=item&#038;id=28\" target=\"_blank\">iStat Menus<\/a> and it does basically the same thing Menu Meters does but in my opinion in a more refined way. I only want to monitor two things so it takes up very little room in my menubar and the information displayed doesn&#8217;t look cluttered or messy. You also get nice extra information by clicking on the items. As well as the way it looks, I also like how the entire app is shipped as a preference pane. This makes it easy to install and easy to configure. Like all the other iStat variants iStat Menus is free. <\/p>\n<p>The screen shots below show the way I am using iStat Menus.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/11\/istatmenucollapsed.png\" alt=\"iStat Menus collapsed\" border=\"0\" width=\"114\" height=\"42\" style=\"border:1px solid black; float:none;\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/11\/istatmenutemps.png\" alt=\"iStat Temperature Menu Expanded\" border=\"0\" width=\"191\" height=\"209\" style=\"border:1px solid black; float:none;\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/11\/istatmenunetwork.png\" alt=\"iStat Network Menu Expanded\" border=\"0\" width=\"188\" height=\"250\" style=\"border:1px solid black; float:none;\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been a huge fan of the various iStat products for years. I don&#8217;t feel at home on any Mac unless iStat Nano is installed. I used to use the command line tool top all the time to see what programs were hogging resources when ever my machine slowed down, now I just bring up [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[26,139,188,463],"series":[],"class_list":["post-591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers-tech","tag-os-x","tag-review","tag-software","tag-utility"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7t9xK-9x","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=591"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7582,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591\/revisions\/7582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=591"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}