As much as Apple wants Mac users to believe that the Mac ‘just works’ there are times when you need to know what’s going on inside that aluminum slab.
Now, you can open up Terminal and type in top to check on various and sundry running processes and the resources they consume, but there’s a better way than mucking with geek. How about a Mac dashboard, a one glance way to see gauges and stats that matter the most, with a touch of eye candy.
iPulse Meet Eye Candy
While you’re banging away on the keyboard or bouncing back and forth between apps in a vain attempt to multi-task, you’re Mac is working as feverishly as Chinese children making iPhones and iPads.
Inside that elegant aluminum slab OS X is busy heating up the CPU, using memory, draining the battery, and move the internet to your screen at just under the speed of light (or less, depending on your connection).
How can you glance and see all those details? iPulse, a graphical dashboard of OS X systems, monitored while you work.
It’s all there with a glance– memory, storage usage, CPU usage, system load, motherboard temperature, network activity and more. One look tells all.
Settings can be adjusted to meet your preferences, including window size, priorities, opacity settings, even the gauge colors.
Roll the Mac’s onscreen pointer over the iStats dashboard and all the details pop up in a translucent window. Or, just use the Menubar icons for a quick look at what’s happening under the hood.
iStats is mostly set it and forget it but you can get your geek on with the Preferences panel, which displays settings for CPU, Memory, Disk, Network, Mobility, History, Clock, Windows, and Global.
The only difficulty you’ll have with iStats is figuring out the arcane color schemes in the round dashboard, but those are customizable. Small text hovering over each item would be handy.
iStats works with single or dual CPU Macs, and the eye candy grows with a bunch of Jackets which dress up the visual dashboard with multiple themes.
There’s just no better looking way to look at what’s going on inside your Mac.
