8 Reasons To Love The Eye Candy App That Monitors Your Mac’s System 24/7

There’s eye candy apps which have a visual esthetic, and then there’s eye candy apps for the Mac which are functional and useful.

Most of the time our Macs just work and don’t tell us much more than how much battery life remains. Add iStat Menus to your Mac and check eight different functions any time you want. What good is an eye candy app if it doesn’t earn its keep?

iStat Menus has been around a few years, but gets more visually appealing and useful with each iteration, including the latest.

As with most Mac monitoring apps, iStat Menus resides in the Mac’s Menubar, and monitors eight different Mac system functions.

First, it tracks in real time the Mac’s CPU performance, the top 5 CPU resource users, and displays it all in nice graph.

The CPU display can show all cores combined or track individual cores (which saves Menubar space; it’s crowded up there).

Second, iStat Menus displays your Mac’s random access memory (RAM) as a graph so you can see which apps use the most memory. Choose from pie chart, percentage, or bar or a combination.

Take a look at how information is displayed in the Menubar, but even more detail is a click away in the app.

Third, monitoring your network connection full time can give you an idea of which of the top five apps is using the network the most (and a total).

iStat Menu also monitors the Mac’s storage and does so in a couple of ways. It checks for free space, and uses S.M.A.R.T. status monitoring to make sure you disk is healthy (but it won’t do anything but report what the disk reports).

As you use the Mac’s storage, there’s a Disk Activity indicator which displays real time usage.

Macs have a number of built-in sensors, and iStat Menus gives you a look at temperature, hard disk temperatures, fans, internal voltages, current, and power, but also adds the convenience of controlling fans with rule sets (different for using battery vs. plug in power).

There’s options for managing the date, time, and calendar in the Menubar with more options than standard in OS X’s preferences. There’s even a calendar which pulls data from Calendar in OS X.

Of course, no system monitoring app would be worth anything if it didn’t monitor the battery in a MacBook. This one also monitors battery life in the mouse, trackpad, and keyboard.

iStat Menus is visually attractive, elegant and simple to use, and functional. And addictive.

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